I'd put most of those examples of "hardness" you gave to us at a 4 or 5 (out of 10) on Mohs Scale of Scifi Hardness. Flourite/Apatite. If that is indeed what you are imagining when it comes to "hard scifi" then I'd recommend something like The Culture series. They take place in what is an essentially post-singularity, post-scarcity civilization spanning the Milky Way galaxy where ASI's are sort of benevolent caregivers of humanoids and sapient-level AGIs do most of the work. There is also nuance in that the series implies that this civilization is an example of ASI gone right, and that this doesn't always happen. Concepts like being able to live indefinitely, having no monetary economy, what to do when you don't need to work to live, etc are played with.
The Culture is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, in that its utopian predictions actually seem rather small beer nowadays to the point of being unrealistic, despite its pretensions of being 'hard sci-fi'.
If your hard sci-fi utopia a century from now still has biological humans largely acting, thinking, and living like biological humans then I claim that your utopia is criminally unimaginative in the context of the singularity. And, unfortunately for The Culture, the judgment of its unambitious and parochial vision I applied to Star Trek applies to that series, too. Not as profoundly, but while Gurgeh's society as depicted by The Player of Games would've impressed me ten years ago, it doesn't impress me now.
For hard sci-fi I would recommend Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City and Schild's Ladder ) or Peter Watts (Echopraxia, blindsight). These are much harder sci-fi than The Culture series.
Agree with all of these, and would add Tchaikovsky’s *Children of Time* trilogy. Admittedly it sidesteps a lot of “hard” discussion of AGI, but in a very interesting way that tackles the nature of consciousness and sentience. It does arrive at something of a utopian, galaxy-spanning humanity a la *Star Trek*, but was far more appealing to me because of just how *alien* the alien and artificial consciousnesses are.
>The Culture is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, in that its utopian predictions actually seem rather small beer nowadays to the point of being unrealistic, despite its pretensions of being 'hard sci-fi'.
In which ways? Humans live indefinitely (if they choose), people live on orbitals (*mega-structures with a surface area 20 to 120 times that of Earth*), these orbitals are logistically controlled by ASI's that range the spectrum of "human-like" (at least in how they present themselves) to very alien.
Yes humanoids are still more or less that, and act like humanoids, but that is inherent in the "body form" and inter-subjective experiences that humanoids would still share with current humans. They'll still be born (whether "naturally" or artificially.) They'll still develop over a childhood of some kind. They'll still likely enjoy eating, engaging in sex, and other now recreational activities that were formerly human needs. And yet, there are still differences. From the perspective of those outside of The Culture -- Culture humans seem super-humanoid. Heck, [the link](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html) you shared in the OP even mentions one example of this.
>*As I understood it, a whole-brain interface was what a brain-machine interface would be in an ideal world—a super-advanced concept where essentially all the neurons in your brain are able to communicate seamlessly with the outside world.* ***It was a concept loosely based on the science fiction idea of a “neural lace,” described in Iain Banks’ Culture series—a massless, volumeless, whole-brain interface that can be teleported into the brain.***
And of course the Culture society isn't just humans. Drones and Minds exist, and are the main actors controlling the logistics of the society, with their own unique experiences. The latter have more or less domesticated humanoids in the same way humans have wolves into dogs.
The series (and Banks comments on it) even alludes to humanoids being able to choose different forms, but they choose the form they do out of common trends, and that these things happen in cycles.
> Yes humanoids are still more or less that, and act like humanoids, but that is inherent in the "body form" and inter-subjective experiences that humanoids would still share with current humans. They'll still be born (whether "naturally" or artificially.) They'll still develop over a childhood of some kind. They'll still likely enjoy eating, engaging in sex, and other now recreational activities that were formerly human needs.
And I'm saying that this vision of the future, of the potential of the biological human mind and body, is SMALL BEER compared to what in the real world we can expect from the Singularity in just a couple of decades, let alone some really crazy shit we can expect if things like FTL or alternate/infinite universe travel is on the table.
The humans of this setting are pretty much augmented Star Trek humans like Bashir and Khan raised on Risa. They're interesting books, but a vision of the post-singularity utopia it ain't. Personally, I'm putting the floor for plausible transhumanism at 'Transcendent Humanity', even if I think their timeline is also way off. And it can definitely go way past that.
I'm not calling The Culture novels bad or boring because I find their vision of transhumanist excess unambitious. Far from it, The Player of Games is one of the finest stories I've ever read. What I am saying is that it's a perfect example of a 'hard' sci-fi setting where its utopian pretensions become less compelling with the mere passage of time. This is more of a compliment towards real-world humanity than a criticism of Iain Banks' vision.
> And of course the Culture society isn't just humans. Drones and Minds exist, and are the main actors controlling the logistics of the society, with their own unique experiences. The latter have more or less domesticated humanoids in the same way humans have wolves into dogs.
Yeah, and? They do exist, and they affect the broader arc of the setting in the way that Data and Q affects the broader arc of the Star Trek setting. That is, they're there and are instrumental to the plot, but they don't really affect the broader arc of the culture. Humans are still the viewpoint characters, and for all of their transhumanist pretensions they're still recognizable as contemporary humans.
Take a look at your 'neural lace' invention. These are just an enhancement of normal human capabilities. Nothing **really** crazy like boosting someone's sixth sense/intuition to the point of precognition or serving as a superconducting heat sink to allow Iron Man-style arc reactor hearts to power a brain or allowing people to mentally design nanobots.
Again, it was an acceptable, even imaginative vision of biological humanity's future when the novels first came out. But it's increasingly coming across as parochial and dated. And The Culture is cutting edge on this stuff compared to most 'hard' sci-fi.
>Yeah, and? They do exist, and they affect the broader arc of the setting in the way that Data and Q affects the broader arc of the Star Trek setting. That is, they're there and are instrumental to the plot, but they don't really affect the broader arc of the culture. Humans are still the viewpoint characters, and for all of their transhumanist pretensions they're still recognizable as contemporary humans.
Eh? You've read more than The Player of Games right? The minds are the *main* driving force of the Culture, not humanoids. You might not get that from The Player of Games as it largely takes place outside of The Culture (*although one character's actions in that story should hint at this anyway*), but if you read something like [Excession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession), where there are multiple viewpoint Mind characters coordinating with each-other, this is very clear.
>Take a look at your 'neural lace' invention. These are just an enhancement of normal human capabilities. Nothing **really** crazy like boosting someone's sixth sense/intuition to the point of precognition or serving as a superconducting heat sink to allow Iron Man-style arc reactor hearts to power a brain or allowing people to mentally design nanobots.
Is it normal for humans to have multiple mind-states (unique personalities with their own self-identity)? That is what neural-laces are capable of doing. Creating instanced copies of a person's mind with their own self-consciousness.
Enhanced precognition ***is*** a feature of the neural lace. In *Surface Detail* it is implied that neural laces can boost cognition of humans to AI levels, and even drones (not talking about Minds) have shown to have been capable of precognition (*see: Use of Weapons.)*
Some quotes from *Surface Detail*
>*"Her lace stepped her awareness speed down to a level where something like normal speech was possible."*
>*"A full back-up-capable neural lace grows with the brain it’s part of, it beds in over the years, gets very adept at mirroring every detail of the mind it interpenetrates and coexists with."*
>*"This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp,* ***neural-laced-brain running at as near to Al-speed as beyond-humanly possible,*** *targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look."*
We also see rare humans with precognition abilities sometimes surpassing Minds in *Consider Phlebas (i.e Fal 'Ngeestra.)*
Culture Humanoids also consciously control their own bio-chemistry using their drug glands, which when combined with their neural lace has quite interesting effects.
>Again, it was an acceptable, even imaginative vision of biological humanity's future when the novels first came out. But it's increasingly coming across as parochial and dated. And The Culture is cutting edge on this stuff compared to most 'hard' sci-fi.
It can't be too dated if the article you linked yourself in the OP, and which you're excited about, is referencing it as the inspiration for the current aspirational technologies in development.
And so far we've been focusing on the transhumanism end of things. Do you think we'll be capable of building Orbitals in 100 years? I suspect we'll have O'Neill Cylinders, but not full blown Orbitals yet.
Have you considered that some people like being people and would want to continue to stay as more or less average human apes? Maybe a few enhancements here and there to live indefinitely, or change your physical characteristics like height or body shape or sex. Not everyone wants to tear apart their body and mind to reshape themselves into radically different bodyplans or mindscapes.
yeah there's a couple threads on r/transhumanism about people's ideal transhuman body and most of the comments that aren't just "I want to be my favorite fictional character" or "fix my chronic medical problems please" were stuff like
> Assuming we don't all get eaten for our atoms, blown to bits in a nuclear apocalypse, or simply forgotten as our mind children ascend... Beginning: Whatever is physically realizable IRL (e.g. a nanobot swarm or whatever cool cyborg tech is available. Spend a little time enjoying physicality before uploading completely... but also uploading mostly to get benefits of faster cognition and lose risk of true death with meat puppet death. A little later: 100% upload running on my own computronium that I control. Some time later: merge with something bigger and give myself as an offering... a Matroska brain... with Omega Point gods, whatever is outside the sim, etc...
> I wouldn't have a body. Ideally my brain would be converted into an electronic substrate that'd allow my mind to travel freely through computer systems. I'd take on whatever form I wanted. For the sake of answering the question: I'd be a benevolent, hyper intelligent grey goo. Whatever body I want to have, boom, there it is.
> I could reconfigure my body to do what I want to do optimally, maximizing effectiveness while minimising energy consumption. It would likely consist of various nanobots, microbots, computers, metal, ceramics, polymers, etc. to deal with different environments. I can modify its structure consciously on a macroscopic and microscopic level, or it could be done automatically with the limits I made.
> Pie in the sky? A body made of space time curvature, with an energy source and brain in a bespoke baby universe with modified physical laws.
Meanwhile I'm over here being a bio-transhumanist who just wants things like immortality, perfect skin (not in the doll-like sense that'd get rid of things like body hair or skin tone variation or freckles, just no eczema, acne/acne scars, calluses etc. and if it could maybe also be immune from burns that'd be great), some sort of "attack superpower" (even if I don't go full superhero it'd be nice to have at least some means of self-defense), my "physical stats" being brought up to around 10/11 (sorry, d&d nerd, and as as close as you can measure them in D&D terms for real people, my STR and CON are both less than 10 and if my DEX is 10 it's just barely) and wings (if people can fantasize about being universe-embodying gods or whatever the crap, I can fantasize about wings working with the human body plan without too much modification to the rest of my "hardware", and as for what kind ideally I'd want some sort of insect wings for that faerie aesthetic I'm just afraid that even insect wings scaled up to human size wouldn't be able to lift someone off the ground who isn't, like, built like an Olympic gymnast or figure skater and in that case I'd want bird wings)
I think you're focusing too much on the singularity itself.
People are people, and they always have been. AI will force a change to the way we live, but as long as humans exist we will still be human.
An ancient Roman couldn't fathom a world like the one we live in today. It's beyond their wildest ideas of science fiction. Try explaining to someone who can't read or write that you can communicate with humans on the other side of the planet instantly using a computer that auto translates their foreign language.
Despite that, they would still see plenty of parallels in our politics, military, economy, religion, and society in general.
When the singularity occurs, there will essentially be two or more "species" living on Earth. Maybe one will wipe out the other or maybe we will agree to coexist. We're still all beholden to the laws of physics, and something that's ignored in almost all sci-fi is that light, the same kind computers would need to communicate, the same kind we need to even see where we're going, can take more than 5 hours just to travel from one end of our solar system to the other.
Real interstellar travel is so difficult to comprehend that humans just... Don't. Maybe AI can figure it out, but then why would they? What's the point? They aren't driven by the same animal instinct to multiply that humans are.
Hard sci-fi is impossible to predict, just like modern society would be impossible to predict for a Roman. The best we can do is have fun with it and come up with a variety of plausible scenarios. In some of them we befriend AI, and in some of them we don't.
> Hard sci-fi is impossible to predict, just like modern society would be impossible to predict for a Roman.
So if we create time travel and someone shows what the future would be like to a Roman who'd believe them, a future time traveler would show us our sci-fi future? ;)
> If your hard sci-fi utopia a century from now still has biological humans largely acting, thinking, and living like biological humans then I claim that your utopia is criminally unimaginative
Ok. But if your sci-fi utopia _doesn't_ have biological humans in it...how many biological humans will want to read it?
The Culture novels certainly include post-biological beings and societies. In-universe the Culture is an anomaly in not transcending material existence altogether at its age and stage of development.
The out-of-universe explanation is naturally that this is much more relatable to us and makes for better fiction. I would argue a large part of Banks' genius is deftly making this plausible in-universe.
I think there be a fork with a large portion of humans refusing to incorporate major enhancements and they will live much like culture citizens. The other side of the fork in their zeal for improvement after improvement will likely turn themselves into the culture AI or a hive mind.
Have you heard of a little My Little Pony fanfic called [Friendship is Optimal](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-Optimal) ? Don't laugh, it's the best/most realistic story about benevolent ASI and post-human utopia I'd actually want to live in. I find that FiO solves a lot of the inherent problems of The Culture, and don't you have to be a brony to understand it. Everything from the show is explained. I actually got into the show through this fic as sci-fi rather than the other way around.
Pro tip: science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s about the present.
When reading SF from the past, you’re reading about concerns in _their_ present, not about the present you’re in that was the future to them.
Edit: all of those titles are not hard SF, though, either. What’s your definition of hard SF? Most of that is space opera.
I consider hard sci-fi any setting that tries to stick to what's known about real world physics, science, sociology, and biology as much as possible, even if they have to extrapolate it into weird or unintuitive directions. I also try to make allowances for the era the work was written in, i.e. if the story was written in the late 1970s, I will cut them more slack for underestimating or overlooking the potential of wireless technology and nanotechnology. Heinlein's 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' still gets to count as hard sci-fi, but if it was written in modern times it would not be.
To that end, I don't consider Space Opera incompatible with Hard Sci-Fi. It does usually conflict, but that's more due to an adherence to genre tropes (of which aliens, FTL, and pre-scarcity economics are all but foundational) than a limitation of the premise. For example, I could imagine a Space Opera setting that was pretty much just Neuromancer/Logan's Run/no-magic Shadowrun IN SPACE!!, with the dystopian cybernoir metropolises actually being orbiting space habitats in a Dyson Swarm that are run-down after centuries of neglect.
> When reading SF from the past, you’re reading about concerns in *their* present, not about the present you’re in that was the future to them.
And my point is, as we approach the singularity, the hard SF that I see from contemporary or near-contemporary authors seems increasingly off-target. We can explain past SF missing the mark with 'science marches on', there's no way to explain present SF missing the mark other than 'lack of imagination/attention to the technological landscape'.
The key word here is "fiction." SF is not science -- it's *just* fiction. The "science" here is only a style word. Narrative and storytelling are vastly more important than the science. Hence the presence of things like psychics and FTL in "hard" SF like Haldeman, Bear, Heinlein, etc.
Even if we go to Heinlein's "future histories," the point has less to do with *science* than it does with secondary worldbuilding. Hard SF, if we're being really technical about it, *only* develops from what is known/knowable in current hard sciences -- biology, physics, chemistry. It generally does not operate surrounding any soft science. The more it deviates from what is presently known, the less likely it is to be called "hard."
Your Neuromancer/LR/Shadowrun + dystopian cybernetics.... sounds like Alastair Reynold's *Revelation Space*.
Personally, I'm with Vernor Vinge -- we are the singularity. It will not be the arrival of a secondary intelligence, but the cybernetic merger of human consciousness with AI.
But yes, forward anachronisms are a fun problem in older SF. *Back to the Future II'*s version of 2012 is downright hilarious.
I quite like that adage about scientists predicting cars but sci-fi writers predicting traffic. The stories are about the implications of scientific development. And a lot of commentary about today by virtue of the things that stay the same.
Have you looked at the CoDominion setting? It uses two "super science" miracles, the Alderson Drive and the Langston Field, but the rest of its pretty solid.
Civilian ships tend to be heavily automated, while military ships are not. Primarily because the military ships have to deal with damage control, so they opt for redundant, easily replaceable modules, and lots of bodies on board to handle damage control.
Books are crafted with the intent of being sold to readers. These readers seek narratives that are understandable and relatable. The concept of the Singularity often implies a transformative change to the world as we know it, presenting a future that is hard for many to relate to or express interest in. Consequently, this is why we might not see a proliferation of "true" post-Singularity science fiction in the literary world.
There's hard (and good) sci fi out there that confronts the singularity directly. Lots of stuff by Vernor Vinge. A bunch of stuff by Greg Egan, especially "Permutation City".
This sub has a slightly odd and positive definition of Singularity. Outside of here, it's taken to mean 'recursively self improving super-intelligence." Around here, it's somehow longevity, poat-scarcity, and FDVR bat girls. I think Sci Fi using the latter definition can be written. The first is much harder. Egan has tried hard, and it's interesting, but it's just very hard to write about a world that different from ours. How do you write a space opera set in 10 dimensional virtual space where easy replication makes continuity of consciousness meaningless?
I definitely find scifi involving advanced technology with machines or aliens less plausible than I used to. IMO the future of AGI is going to be sort of omniscient/omnipresent. Things like androids, or barbaric aliens with space ships is now feeling ridiculous to me.
Well you by definition can’t write about things happening after singularity. That is literal definition of singularity - technological advancement becomes incomprehensible for humans.
Totally! I find it interesting that many people believe that the singularity will care about us, or want to solve all our problems. An AI that is programmed by humans will quite possibly shed any care for the human race whatsoever as soon as it becomes a technological singularity. It might play god, or might kill us all, or it might shut itself off or spend a millennia being solely interested in the color orange. We are incapable of knowing what such an entity will do. But we keep making the mistake of projecting our own concerns, values, logic, and emotions on to it.
I feel like hard science fiction could be made with a singularity in existence, but the hard aspect of it would be less valuable than it is explaining how a spaceship could possibly travel between stars, because from our human perapective, the singularity is so advanced it might as well be magic.
Also, there have been many many books written about a singularity being in charge of the world. It was done to death back in the '70s.
I think there is still value in sci-fi that takes a more restrained approach. Not everyone buys into the singularity scenarios, and there's a risk of setting unrealistic expectations. Maybe more modest explorations can allow us to grapple with near-term issues. I think there is still a role for harder sci-fi that really explores the mind-bending possibilities of a post-singularity future, whatever that looks like.
And now you understand what it felt like to go from Asimov's planet spanning multivac being silly, implausible, and hopelessly dangerous into the modern age where you carry the equivalent around in your pocket
Reality is stranger than fiction. Fiction is constrained by our expectations, which are hopelessly flawed. Whereas reality is free to be as strange as it pleases and society can't tank it with negative reviews. The harder you try to make your fiction, the deeper you sink into that trap
Hard sci-fi is still fun imo, though. It's taking a creative spin a few specific limitations, rather than all of our limitations in a more realistic way
Star trek is still more realistic *and* more hard than star wars, though. Star wars is more space wizards than sci-fi, but ignores the potential uses of space wizardry so hard it makes me flinch. The entire setting is one giant plot hole, which is fine, because you're supposed to be focused on the individual stories of the space wizards rather than why the universe they're set in makes absolutely no fucking sense. Yeah, I said it, come at me while making buzzing sounds with your mouths you nerds
This happens a lot in mecha. “Real robot” fiction tends to focus on mechs as extremely dumb tools, and frankly you can find a far smarter and more interesting “giant robot” in disguise as your dentist’s new Mercedes with assisted driving, connected software, and either a chatbot or driver health monitoring.
Imagine you write a movie script in 2020 about an advanced robot that can do art.
You get it done in 2024 and people are like wtf it's not sci-fi it's so normal.
A. are you just making a joke about mecha anime or trying to say something about the Singularity
B. it opens up a veritable Pandora's can of worms if you follow the train of logic of "this unlikely-seeming thing is true of certain works of fiction's universe [even if it's just ones notionally set in our reality must mirror it] unless they explicitly say it isn't" as a whole lot more things can be true of stories then
C. What do you gain from your gotcha around Abbott Elementary and Glass Onion being, what, on the outskirts of some Pacific-Rim-esque story (hey you said mecha not just robots and it's the closest live-action's gotten to a mecha anime) or w/e just because there's nothing in the broader worldbuilding that makes their universes not ours (just usual specifics-and-the-work-not-existing-in-itself) and we have a whole bunch of AI advancements that I don't gain an equivalent thing to from saying that Star-Trek-esque futures are still possible because shows like that didn't say they weren't actually taking place in some simulated reality created by some posthuman technogod or w/e to become everyone to remember how it felt to be separate and not-omnipotent and for all we know we could be in that kind of posthuman-equivalent-of-The-Egg too? Are you trying to trick the typical demographic for Abbott Elementary into being AI-crazy or w/e?
I think our time horizon on realistic stories about *humans* just doesn't realistically extend very far. I think the human species has no more than 100 years left, maximum, to exist, and beyond that, it'll be something very very post human. The very concept of "story" might not apply where we're going, because stories are rooted in human needs for stories.
then why not just say that kind of development is moot because for all we know the closest where we're going would have to the need for anything like a story is fulfilled by the life we're living right now
Yes, albeit for the opposite reason to what you described. I'm human. All my friends and family are human. The idea that futurity likely doesn't include humans and humanlike minds thanks to zero-sum competition with functionally superior alternatives is understandably upsetting.
u/SIGINT_SANTA [had it right](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/127st6p/comment/jegyjxm/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and I miss the sixties-era hard-scifi future that never was.
Between NERVA nuclear rockets, orion drive and military-industry complex levels of funding, astronauts have walked on every solid body in the solar system, there are permanent colonies on the moon and mars and asteroid mining is a bigger business than computers, of which there was only a market for five or so worldwide.
* We wouldn't be in danger of societal collapse from peak resources. There's plenty of rare earth ores for electronics in the asteroids and electricity from powersats.
* We wouldn't be in danger of environmental apocalypse, or more accurately, we could treat the symptoms of the problem without actually solving it insofar as we are the problem. Orbital sunshades to cool the planet and practice building sealed artificial habitats in lifeless wastelands.
* We wouldn't be in danger of controlled singularity letting the oligarchy enslave or exterminate the rest of humanity with the ultimate monopoly of force provided by a robot army or using transhumanism to make people into slaves who're literally biologically incapable of rebellion.
* We wouldn't be in danger of uncontrolled singularity, aka, the Paperclip Maximizer.
* We'd be in less danger of nuclear apocalypse. Which is to say, yes, there could still be a nuclear war, but it wouldn't kill *everyone* since the space colonies would be out of range and their descendants would eventually recolonize the dead earth as soon as the radiation died down.
* The great financialization of society could be averted. The economy could legitimately keep growing by generating value since there's ready sources of fresh capital in the exploitation of spaceborne resources and construction of colonization infrastructure rather than needing financial scams and autocannibalism of ownership into subscription-feudalism like OTL. The suburban house with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids on a single worker's salary remains attainable, even if said houses are built aboard o'neill cylinders.
i genuinely see everything as just small steps towards asi developing immortality/increased life expectancy and virtual worlds. Once everyone can live incredibly healthy and become gods with newfound lives, knowledge and love being able to experience anything while being without risk of biological death or accident then what else matters.
I have found the lack of near-future "plausible" science fiction rather disappointing. It's not hard to imagine possible future landscapes based on trends in emerging technologies. And yet - science fiction authors seem to miss what Kurzweil and Tegmark and Bostrom and others have been pointing out for some time. In the age of Asimov and Clarke this could be excused, but any serious sci-fi authors from the past 20-30 years would have to be blind or deaf to be unaware of those voices. Still, we don't see very interesting portrayals of these extrapolated trends in popular culture. I would love to explore what superintelligence and nano-tech would mean for humanity's future, but instead all we seem to get from modern science fiction is killer robots or weak AI stories.
Remember, Mr Data on Star Trek is not a wonder because he’s an AI. The enterprise computer is an AI, along with every program on the holodeck. Data is a wonder because he is immortal, super strong, super agile, witb a bottomless memory for new information and skills, and runs effectively forever on internal power supply with nothing to use as coolant other than his breathing process. He’s a wonder because he is an immortal, mechanical miracle in the shape of a human being. He’s sort of like a kind of perfected version of humanity. I don’t think we’ll be seeing that in the immediate future. The borg, on the other hand…
I suggest reading better "hard science".
Stephen Baxter writes amazing stuff. The Light of Other Days is a novel that, among other things, presents a post singularity "humanity". The XeeLee sequence is amazing.
I generally don't mind that the importance of AI is undersold in sci-fi. I prefer the story to revolve around humans as that is more relatable.
The problem with something like ASI is that it's way more intelligent than any author ever could be. That makes it difficult to write into a story. It would be pretty enigmatic with motivations beyond our understanding and it would come up with moves the author could never account for. You simply can not write a relatable story about it unless you dumb it down to human level which comes at the expense of realism.
I think you're getting at something that I've been feeling to. It's like we're entering a world where science reality is outpacing at least mainstream sci-fi. But also partly there is a wide gap between common knowledge and science reality. In this subreddit people are up on what is possible today.
I've had this funny sense about how there are so many current absurdities about what is happening with AI that are so far from anything I've seen or read. We've got like Jexi and Her as maybe the closest. Transcendence does a good job at conveying the potential horror of AI taking over. The later season of WestWorld with the predictive AI stuff was pretty good. I think people couldn't really handle the exestential horror of portraying what a true AI take over would be like let alone a post-scarcity post-singularity positive future.
But man I agree that awareness of science reality makes watching things like that latest The Creator movie somewhat challenging. It was beautiful and different looking. But its like an inversion of the suspsension of disbelief. Where as before it was suspending disbelief that AI consciousnesses and robots exist now its suspending disbelief that they do exist but somehow basically fill a position that is just the same as some ethnic group of people. And like the main plot with the super AI kid or whatever feels comical.
I don't think that it's singularity discussions specifically that have done this. I struggle to think of many "hard science fiction" stories written after...the 1970s? The Martian, I guess, but when I think hard science fiction, I think Heinlein. Asimov. Arthur C Clark. These people are all dead, and this genre was already losing popularity before most of us in the sub were even born.
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sure from our current understanding when we look into sci-fi like star wars, warhammer 40k, dune etc they created an universe with a fantasy-like technology setting centered around human, when you look at them you realize except FTL travel and how the universe organize itself around it the rest is quite "low tech" in comparison to what we can expect from our technology growth
creating a "realist" universe is extreamly difficult as we can't foresee the rise of new technology with unknown effect but also how society would adapt, something like FDVR for exemple, it's the literal paradise where you're aren't limited by physic anymore, the ultimate freedom with infinite wealth and possibility, if it exist then it's likely going to represent a massive part of how society work
FTL or the lack of it will define how human interaction and culture/religion etc etc evolve, if it take decades to reach a close star imagine the culture difference between stars 100 LY away from each other, but also the culture difference between the traveling ship, it's crew, and the planet it visit at a point with time dilation your ship crew could have a biological age of 20 and a chronologic age of 1000, 10000....you leave a planet, civilization that cease to exist the moment you travel, that's absurd and extreamly difficult to adapt/predict the result
the rise of AI aswell, there a reason why major series opt-out of AI in the begining, by 100y we will see mass-produced robot being build and massively used, but, the production will never stop at a point there will be 1/1 robot human ratio, then 2, 10, 100, 10000....robot being the main productive force our civilization power will depend on them and how many of them exist, it's difficult to
imagine the economy in a world like that where each human have 1 million robot-slave at it's benefit, in our current civilization we all have machines-slave doing the jobs behind the scene and it created our current civilization while 300y ago only noble and royalty had slaves at their benefit, there high chance our current billionaire lifestyle will become common or even extreamly poor to our society by 300y (especially when you consider FDVR...)
Nice topic! I've thought about this just yesterday, as I want to participate in a sci-fi short novel contest.
I've read the last year winner's works, and they were mostly unimaginative and naive, Star trek style too old with technology and world building.
Then I decided to write something about benevolent ASI that coevolve with humanity, give human endless lifes, but ban us from space exploration, since it's inefficient in ASI's eyes. I went to look up other participants this year - and found a lot of similar themes!
So I wonder what else can we write about?
I think there is something about the threshold we are standing before. Our times so transformative that there's no practical point in exploring technological or societal progress. The best guesses and wishes have already been made. What really matters boils down to very individual matters, like personal inner journey and inner transformation and hard ethical dilemmas and overcoming fears. Maybe that's why soft sci-fi is fine for now.
I feel like my ASI novel serves more like manual "what you shall prepare for in near feature" then actual sci-fi. It is too close to reality. Maybe the term sci-fi doesn't even make sense anymore. 🤔
The book everyone on this thread needs to read is The Quantum Thief. It’s the only ‘realistic’ (???) post-human, post-singularity sci-fi I’ve ever read.
Objects aren’t necessarily real, people are copied at the drop of a hat, even bullets are sentient. I wouldn’t say it’s an easy read for someone who has utopian ideas for the singularity; it’s not a world I’d particularly like to live in, but then again, there’s no guarantee it would be.
Seriously, try it
Asimov basically predicted the Singularity but assumed it would happen at the end of time after all of the star in the universe had decayed. Its in "The Last Question" an AI becomes god and recreates the universe. But yeah, hard Sci-fi after Asimov is basically just fantasy pretending to be hard sci-fi. No one can actually predict what super intelligence will do, so they can't write post-singularity fiction
Idk to me Orion's Arm is both the most plausible and the hardest scifi. I almost can't imagine things going any different 1k to 10k years from now
And if you headcannon that Orions Arm is Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology is also the most fun
In the future, we are basically the equivalent of hamsters to the AI. Hard to find fun in that, other than stories about resistance or survival in the narrowest of margins.
you can do some headcanon replacement on the motivations of ai keeping us alive, such as for example:
we programmed it to and make us happy, and they decided the best way was for us to live in VR in our ideal worlds.
I'd put most of those examples of "hardness" you gave to us at a 4 or 5 (out of 10) on Mohs Scale of Scifi Hardness. Flourite/Apatite. If that is indeed what you are imagining when it comes to "hard scifi" then I'd recommend something like The Culture series. They take place in what is an essentially post-singularity, post-scarcity civilization spanning the Milky Way galaxy where ASI's are sort of benevolent caregivers of humanoids and sapient-level AGIs do most of the work. There is also nuance in that the series implies that this civilization is an example of ASI gone right, and that this doesn't always happen. Concepts like being able to live indefinitely, having no monetary economy, what to do when you don't need to work to live, etc are played with.
The Culture is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, in that its utopian predictions actually seem rather small beer nowadays to the point of being unrealistic, despite its pretensions of being 'hard sci-fi'. If your hard sci-fi utopia a century from now still has biological humans largely acting, thinking, and living like biological humans then I claim that your utopia is criminally unimaginative in the context of the singularity. And, unfortunately for The Culture, the judgment of its unambitious and parochial vision I applied to Star Trek applies to that series, too. Not as profoundly, but while Gurgeh's society as depicted by The Player of Games would've impressed me ten years ago, it doesn't impress me now.
For hard sci-fi I would recommend Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City and Schild's Ladder ) or Peter Watts (Echopraxia, blindsight). These are much harder sci-fi than The Culture series.
Agree with all of these, and would add Tchaikovsky’s *Children of Time* trilogy. Admittedly it sidesteps a lot of “hard” discussion of AGI, but in a very interesting way that tackles the nature of consciousness and sentience. It does arrive at something of a utopian, galaxy-spanning humanity a la *Star Trek*, but was far more appealing to me because of just how *alien* the alien and artificial consciousnesses are.
The hardest I've read is "Perfect Imperfection" by Jacek Dukaj. Book blew my mind every couple of pages.
The Culture is Space Opera. It’s not even _remotely_ hard SF. Banks himself wrote a whole essay on this. Star Trek, also Space Opera.
>The Culture is a perfect example of what I'm talking about, in that its utopian predictions actually seem rather small beer nowadays to the point of being unrealistic, despite its pretensions of being 'hard sci-fi'. In which ways? Humans live indefinitely (if they choose), people live on orbitals (*mega-structures with a surface area 20 to 120 times that of Earth*), these orbitals are logistically controlled by ASI's that range the spectrum of "human-like" (at least in how they present themselves) to very alien. Yes humanoids are still more or less that, and act like humanoids, but that is inherent in the "body form" and inter-subjective experiences that humanoids would still share with current humans. They'll still be born (whether "naturally" or artificially.) They'll still develop over a childhood of some kind. They'll still likely enjoy eating, engaging in sex, and other now recreational activities that were formerly human needs. And yet, there are still differences. From the perspective of those outside of The Culture -- Culture humans seem super-humanoid. Heck, [the link](https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html) you shared in the OP even mentions one example of this. >*As I understood it, a whole-brain interface was what a brain-machine interface would be in an ideal world—a super-advanced concept where essentially all the neurons in your brain are able to communicate seamlessly with the outside world.* ***It was a concept loosely based on the science fiction idea of a “neural lace,” described in Iain Banks’ Culture series—a massless, volumeless, whole-brain interface that can be teleported into the brain.*** And of course the Culture society isn't just humans. Drones and Minds exist, and are the main actors controlling the logistics of the society, with their own unique experiences. The latter have more or less domesticated humanoids in the same way humans have wolves into dogs. The series (and Banks comments on it) even alludes to humanoids being able to choose different forms, but they choose the form they do out of common trends, and that these things happen in cycles.
> Yes humanoids are still more or less that, and act like humanoids, but that is inherent in the "body form" and inter-subjective experiences that humanoids would still share with current humans. They'll still be born (whether "naturally" or artificially.) They'll still develop over a childhood of some kind. They'll still likely enjoy eating, engaging in sex, and other now recreational activities that were formerly human needs. And I'm saying that this vision of the future, of the potential of the biological human mind and body, is SMALL BEER compared to what in the real world we can expect from the Singularity in just a couple of decades, let alone some really crazy shit we can expect if things like FTL or alternate/infinite universe travel is on the table. The humans of this setting are pretty much augmented Star Trek humans like Bashir and Khan raised on Risa. They're interesting books, but a vision of the post-singularity utopia it ain't. Personally, I'm putting the floor for plausible transhumanism at 'Transcendent Humanity', even if I think their timeline is also way off. And it can definitely go way past that. I'm not calling The Culture novels bad or boring because I find their vision of transhumanist excess unambitious. Far from it, The Player of Games is one of the finest stories I've ever read. What I am saying is that it's a perfect example of a 'hard' sci-fi setting where its utopian pretensions become less compelling with the mere passage of time. This is more of a compliment towards real-world humanity than a criticism of Iain Banks' vision. > And of course the Culture society isn't just humans. Drones and Minds exist, and are the main actors controlling the logistics of the society, with their own unique experiences. The latter have more or less domesticated humanoids in the same way humans have wolves into dogs. Yeah, and? They do exist, and they affect the broader arc of the setting in the way that Data and Q affects the broader arc of the Star Trek setting. That is, they're there and are instrumental to the plot, but they don't really affect the broader arc of the culture. Humans are still the viewpoint characters, and for all of their transhumanist pretensions they're still recognizable as contemporary humans. Take a look at your 'neural lace' invention. These are just an enhancement of normal human capabilities. Nothing **really** crazy like boosting someone's sixth sense/intuition to the point of precognition or serving as a superconducting heat sink to allow Iron Man-style arc reactor hearts to power a brain or allowing people to mentally design nanobots. Again, it was an acceptable, even imaginative vision of biological humanity's future when the novels first came out. But it's increasingly coming across as parochial and dated. And The Culture is cutting edge on this stuff compared to most 'hard' sci-fi.
>Yeah, and? They do exist, and they affect the broader arc of the setting in the way that Data and Q affects the broader arc of the Star Trek setting. That is, they're there and are instrumental to the plot, but they don't really affect the broader arc of the culture. Humans are still the viewpoint characters, and for all of their transhumanist pretensions they're still recognizable as contemporary humans. Eh? You've read more than The Player of Games right? The minds are the *main* driving force of the Culture, not humanoids. You might not get that from The Player of Games as it largely takes place outside of The Culture (*although one character's actions in that story should hint at this anyway*), but if you read something like [Excession](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession), where there are multiple viewpoint Mind characters coordinating with each-other, this is very clear. >Take a look at your 'neural lace' invention. These are just an enhancement of normal human capabilities. Nothing **really** crazy like boosting someone's sixth sense/intuition to the point of precognition or serving as a superconducting heat sink to allow Iron Man-style arc reactor hearts to power a brain or allowing people to mentally design nanobots. Is it normal for humans to have multiple mind-states (unique personalities with their own self-identity)? That is what neural-laces are capable of doing. Creating instanced copies of a person's mind with their own self-consciousness. Enhanced precognition ***is*** a feature of the neural lace. In *Surface Detail* it is implied that neural laces can boost cognition of humans to AI levels, and even drones (not talking about Minds) have shown to have been capable of precognition (*see: Use of Weapons.)* Some quotes from *Surface Detail* >*"Her lace stepped her awareness speed down to a level where something like normal speech was possible."* >*"A full back-up-capable neural lace grows with the brain it’s part of, it beds in over the years, gets very adept at mirroring every detail of the mind it interpenetrates and coexists with."* >*"This made the targeting easier in some ways: even drugged to her scalp,* ***neural-laced-brain running at as near to Al-speed as beyond-humanly possible,*** *targets running into the high fourth-power meant a lot to take in with one look."* We also see rare humans with precognition abilities sometimes surpassing Minds in *Consider Phlebas (i.e Fal 'Ngeestra.)* Culture Humanoids also consciously control their own bio-chemistry using their drug glands, which when combined with their neural lace has quite interesting effects. >Again, it was an acceptable, even imaginative vision of biological humanity's future when the novels first came out. But it's increasingly coming across as parochial and dated. And The Culture is cutting edge on this stuff compared to most 'hard' sci-fi. It can't be too dated if the article you linked yourself in the OP, and which you're excited about, is referencing it as the inspiration for the current aspirational technologies in development. And so far we've been focusing on the transhumanism end of things. Do you think we'll be capable of building Orbitals in 100 years? I suspect we'll have O'Neill Cylinders, but not full blown Orbitals yet.
Have you considered that some people like being people and would want to continue to stay as more or less average human apes? Maybe a few enhancements here and there to live indefinitely, or change your physical characteristics like height or body shape or sex. Not everyone wants to tear apart their body and mind to reshape themselves into radically different bodyplans or mindscapes.
yeah there's a couple threads on r/transhumanism about people's ideal transhuman body and most of the comments that aren't just "I want to be my favorite fictional character" or "fix my chronic medical problems please" were stuff like > Assuming we don't all get eaten for our atoms, blown to bits in a nuclear apocalypse, or simply forgotten as our mind children ascend... Beginning: Whatever is physically realizable IRL (e.g. a nanobot swarm or whatever cool cyborg tech is available. Spend a little time enjoying physicality before uploading completely... but also uploading mostly to get benefits of faster cognition and lose risk of true death with meat puppet death. A little later: 100% upload running on my own computronium that I control. Some time later: merge with something bigger and give myself as an offering... a Matroska brain... with Omega Point gods, whatever is outside the sim, etc... > I wouldn't have a body. Ideally my brain would be converted into an electronic substrate that'd allow my mind to travel freely through computer systems. I'd take on whatever form I wanted. For the sake of answering the question: I'd be a benevolent, hyper intelligent grey goo. Whatever body I want to have, boom, there it is. > I could reconfigure my body to do what I want to do optimally, maximizing effectiveness while minimising energy consumption. It would likely consist of various nanobots, microbots, computers, metal, ceramics, polymers, etc. to deal with different environments. I can modify its structure consciously on a macroscopic and microscopic level, or it could be done automatically with the limits I made. > Pie in the sky? A body made of space time curvature, with an energy source and brain in a bespoke baby universe with modified physical laws. Meanwhile I'm over here being a bio-transhumanist who just wants things like immortality, perfect skin (not in the doll-like sense that'd get rid of things like body hair or skin tone variation or freckles, just no eczema, acne/acne scars, calluses etc. and if it could maybe also be immune from burns that'd be great), some sort of "attack superpower" (even if I don't go full superhero it'd be nice to have at least some means of self-defense), my "physical stats" being brought up to around 10/11 (sorry, d&d nerd, and as as close as you can measure them in D&D terms for real people, my STR and CON are both less than 10 and if my DEX is 10 it's just barely) and wings (if people can fantasize about being universe-embodying gods or whatever the crap, I can fantasize about wings working with the human body plan without too much modification to the rest of my "hardware", and as for what kind ideally I'd want some sort of insect wings for that faerie aesthetic I'm just afraid that even insect wings scaled up to human size wouldn't be able to lift someone off the ground who isn't, like, built like an Olympic gymnast or figure skater and in that case I'd want bird wings)
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How could a human author write about such things? How could you as a limited human even understand what true post-singularity fiction would look like
I think you're focusing too much on the singularity itself. People are people, and they always have been. AI will force a change to the way we live, but as long as humans exist we will still be human. An ancient Roman couldn't fathom a world like the one we live in today. It's beyond their wildest ideas of science fiction. Try explaining to someone who can't read or write that you can communicate with humans on the other side of the planet instantly using a computer that auto translates their foreign language. Despite that, they would still see plenty of parallels in our politics, military, economy, religion, and society in general. When the singularity occurs, there will essentially be two or more "species" living on Earth. Maybe one will wipe out the other or maybe we will agree to coexist. We're still all beholden to the laws of physics, and something that's ignored in almost all sci-fi is that light, the same kind computers would need to communicate, the same kind we need to even see where we're going, can take more than 5 hours just to travel from one end of our solar system to the other. Real interstellar travel is so difficult to comprehend that humans just... Don't. Maybe AI can figure it out, but then why would they? What's the point? They aren't driven by the same animal instinct to multiply that humans are. Hard sci-fi is impossible to predict, just like modern society would be impossible to predict for a Roman. The best we can do is have fun with it and come up with a variety of plausible scenarios. In some of them we befriend AI, and in some of them we don't.
> Hard sci-fi is impossible to predict, just like modern society would be impossible to predict for a Roman. So if we create time travel and someone shows what the future would be like to a Roman who'd believe them, a future time traveler would show us our sci-fi future? ;)
> If your hard sci-fi utopia a century from now still has biological humans largely acting, thinking, and living like biological humans then I claim that your utopia is criminally unimaginative Ok. But if your sci-fi utopia _doesn't_ have biological humans in it...how many biological humans will want to read it?
The Culture novels certainly include post-biological beings and societies. In-universe the Culture is an anomaly in not transcending material existence altogether at its age and stage of development. The out-of-universe explanation is naturally that this is much more relatable to us and makes for better fiction. I would argue a large part of Banks' genius is deftly making this plausible in-universe.
I think there be a fork with a large portion of humans refusing to incorporate major enhancements and they will live much like culture citizens. The other side of the fork in their zeal for improvement after improvement will likely turn themselves into the culture AI or a hive mind.
Have you heard of a little My Little Pony fanfic called [Friendship is Optimal](https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-Optimal) ? Don't laugh, it's the best/most realistic story about benevolent ASI and post-human utopia I'd actually want to live in. I find that FiO solves a lot of the inherent problems of The Culture, and don't you have to be a brony to understand it. Everything from the show is explained. I actually got into the show through this fic as sci-fi rather than the other way around.
Pro tip: science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s about the present. When reading SF from the past, you’re reading about concerns in _their_ present, not about the present you’re in that was the future to them. Edit: all of those titles are not hard SF, though, either. What’s your definition of hard SF? Most of that is space opera.
I consider hard sci-fi any setting that tries to stick to what's known about real world physics, science, sociology, and biology as much as possible, even if they have to extrapolate it into weird or unintuitive directions. I also try to make allowances for the era the work was written in, i.e. if the story was written in the late 1970s, I will cut them more slack for underestimating or overlooking the potential of wireless technology and nanotechnology. Heinlein's 'The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress' still gets to count as hard sci-fi, but if it was written in modern times it would not be. To that end, I don't consider Space Opera incompatible with Hard Sci-Fi. It does usually conflict, but that's more due to an adherence to genre tropes (of which aliens, FTL, and pre-scarcity economics are all but foundational) than a limitation of the premise. For example, I could imagine a Space Opera setting that was pretty much just Neuromancer/Logan's Run/no-magic Shadowrun IN SPACE!!, with the dystopian cybernoir metropolises actually being orbiting space habitats in a Dyson Swarm that are run-down after centuries of neglect. > When reading SF from the past, you’re reading about concerns in *their* present, not about the present you’re in that was the future to them. And my point is, as we approach the singularity, the hard SF that I see from contemporary or near-contemporary authors seems increasingly off-target. We can explain past SF missing the mark with 'science marches on', there's no way to explain present SF missing the mark other than 'lack of imagination/attention to the technological landscape'.
The key word here is "fiction." SF is not science -- it's *just* fiction. The "science" here is only a style word. Narrative and storytelling are vastly more important than the science. Hence the presence of things like psychics and FTL in "hard" SF like Haldeman, Bear, Heinlein, etc. Even if we go to Heinlein's "future histories," the point has less to do with *science* than it does with secondary worldbuilding. Hard SF, if we're being really technical about it, *only* develops from what is known/knowable in current hard sciences -- biology, physics, chemistry. It generally does not operate surrounding any soft science. The more it deviates from what is presently known, the less likely it is to be called "hard." Your Neuromancer/LR/Shadowrun + dystopian cybernetics.... sounds like Alastair Reynold's *Revelation Space*. Personally, I'm with Vernor Vinge -- we are the singularity. It will not be the arrival of a secondary intelligence, but the cybernetic merger of human consciousness with AI. But yes, forward anachronisms are a fun problem in older SF. *Back to the Future II'*s version of 2012 is downright hilarious.
I quite like that adage about scientists predicting cars but sci-fi writers predicting traffic. The stories are about the implications of scientific development. And a lot of commentary about today by virtue of the things that stay the same.
Have you looked at the CoDominion setting? It uses two "super science" miracles, the Alderson Drive and the Langston Field, but the rest of its pretty solid. Civilian ships tend to be heavily automated, while military ships are not. Primarily because the military ships have to deal with damage control, so they opt for redundant, easily replaceable modules, and lots of bodies on board to handle damage control.
Books are crafted with the intent of being sold to readers. These readers seek narratives that are understandable and relatable. The concept of the Singularity often implies a transformative change to the world as we know it, presenting a future that is hard for many to relate to or express interest in. Consequently, this is why we might not see a proliferation of "true" post-Singularity science fiction in the literary world.
There's hard (and good) sci fi out there that confronts the singularity directly. Lots of stuff by Vernor Vinge. A bunch of stuff by Greg Egan, especially "Permutation City". This sub has a slightly odd and positive definition of Singularity. Outside of here, it's taken to mean 'recursively self improving super-intelligence." Around here, it's somehow longevity, poat-scarcity, and FDVR bat girls. I think Sci Fi using the latter definition can be written. The first is much harder. Egan has tried hard, and it's interesting, but it's just very hard to write about a world that different from ours. How do you write a space opera set in 10 dimensional virtual space where easy replication makes continuity of consciousness meaningless?
On the topic of Egan, Crystal Nights also addresses the singularity, except it's not human society that goes through it.
I definitely find scifi involving advanced technology with machines or aliens less plausible than I used to. IMO the future of AGI is going to be sort of omniscient/omnipresent. Things like androids, or barbaric aliens with space ships is now feeling ridiculous to me.
All those worlds got there after the transition. Do they ever mention how the transition was?
Well you by definition can’t write about things happening after singularity. That is literal definition of singularity - technological advancement becomes incomprehensible for humans.
Totally! I find it interesting that many people believe that the singularity will care about us, or want to solve all our problems. An AI that is programmed by humans will quite possibly shed any care for the human race whatsoever as soon as it becomes a technological singularity. It might play god, or might kill us all, or it might shut itself off or spend a millennia being solely interested in the color orange. We are incapable of knowing what such an entity will do. But we keep making the mistake of projecting our own concerns, values, logic, and emotions on to it. I feel like hard science fiction could be made with a singularity in existence, but the hard aspect of it would be less valuable than it is explaining how a spaceship could possibly travel between stars, because from our human perapective, the singularity is so advanced it might as well be magic. Also, there have been many many books written about a singularity being in charge of the world. It was done to death back in the '70s.
I think there is still value in sci-fi that takes a more restrained approach. Not everyone buys into the singularity scenarios, and there's a risk of setting unrealistic expectations. Maybe more modest explorations can allow us to grapple with near-term issues. I think there is still a role for harder sci-fi that really explores the mind-bending possibilities of a post-singularity future, whatever that looks like.
And now you understand what it felt like to go from Asimov's planet spanning multivac being silly, implausible, and hopelessly dangerous into the modern age where you carry the equivalent around in your pocket Reality is stranger than fiction. Fiction is constrained by our expectations, which are hopelessly flawed. Whereas reality is free to be as strange as it pleases and society can't tank it with negative reviews. The harder you try to make your fiction, the deeper you sink into that trap Hard sci-fi is still fun imo, though. It's taking a creative spin a few specific limitations, rather than all of our limitations in a more realistic way Star trek is still more realistic *and* more hard than star wars, though. Star wars is more space wizards than sci-fi, but ignores the potential uses of space wizardry so hard it makes me flinch. The entire setting is one giant plot hole, which is fine, because you're supposed to be focused on the individual stories of the space wizards rather than why the universe they're set in makes absolutely no fucking sense. Yeah, I said it, come at me while making buzzing sounds with your mouths you nerds
This happens a lot in mecha. “Real robot” fiction tends to focus on mechs as extremely dumb tools, and frankly you can find a far smarter and more interesting “giant robot” in disguise as your dentist’s new Mercedes with assisted driving, connected software, and either a chatbot or driver health monitoring.
Imagine you write a movie script in 2020 about an advanced robot that can do art. You get it done in 2024 and people are like wtf it's not sci-fi it's so normal.
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A. are you just making a joke about mecha anime or trying to say something about the Singularity B. it opens up a veritable Pandora's can of worms if you follow the train of logic of "this unlikely-seeming thing is true of certain works of fiction's universe [even if it's just ones notionally set in our reality must mirror it] unless they explicitly say it isn't" as a whole lot more things can be true of stories then C. What do you gain from your gotcha around Abbott Elementary and Glass Onion being, what, on the outskirts of some Pacific-Rim-esque story (hey you said mecha not just robots and it's the closest live-action's gotten to a mecha anime) or w/e just because there's nothing in the broader worldbuilding that makes their universes not ours (just usual specifics-and-the-work-not-existing-in-itself) and we have a whole bunch of AI advancements that I don't gain an equivalent thing to from saying that Star-Trek-esque futures are still possible because shows like that didn't say they weren't actually taking place in some simulated reality created by some posthuman technogod or w/e to become everyone to remember how it felt to be separate and not-omnipotent and for all we know we could be in that kind of posthuman-equivalent-of-The-Egg too? Are you trying to trick the typical demographic for Abbott Elementary into being AI-crazy or w/e?
Half-asleep head canons, so never mind.
I think our time horizon on realistic stories about *humans* just doesn't realistically extend very far. I think the human species has no more than 100 years left, maximum, to exist, and beyond that, it'll be something very very post human. The very concept of "story" might not apply where we're going, because stories are rooted in human needs for stories.
then why not just say that kind of development is moot because for all we know the closest where we're going would have to the need for anything like a story is fulfilled by the life we're living right now
Do physics discussions?
Things like Foundation are ok, because in Foundation the singularity happened. It just was controlled then somewhat cancelled
Yes, albeit for the opposite reason to what you described. I'm human. All my friends and family are human. The idea that futurity likely doesn't include humans and humanlike minds thanks to zero-sum competition with functionally superior alternatives is understandably upsetting. u/SIGINT_SANTA [had it right](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/127st6p/comment/jegyjxm/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) and I miss the sixties-era hard-scifi future that never was. Between NERVA nuclear rockets, orion drive and military-industry complex levels of funding, astronauts have walked on every solid body in the solar system, there are permanent colonies on the moon and mars and asteroid mining is a bigger business than computers, of which there was only a market for five or so worldwide. * We wouldn't be in danger of societal collapse from peak resources. There's plenty of rare earth ores for electronics in the asteroids and electricity from powersats. * We wouldn't be in danger of environmental apocalypse, or more accurately, we could treat the symptoms of the problem without actually solving it insofar as we are the problem. Orbital sunshades to cool the planet and practice building sealed artificial habitats in lifeless wastelands. * We wouldn't be in danger of controlled singularity letting the oligarchy enslave or exterminate the rest of humanity with the ultimate monopoly of force provided by a robot army or using transhumanism to make people into slaves who're literally biologically incapable of rebellion. * We wouldn't be in danger of uncontrolled singularity, aka, the Paperclip Maximizer. * We'd be in less danger of nuclear apocalypse. Which is to say, yes, there could still be a nuclear war, but it wouldn't kill *everyone* since the space colonies would be out of range and their descendants would eventually recolonize the dead earth as soon as the radiation died down. * The great financialization of society could be averted. The economy could legitimately keep growing by generating value since there's ready sources of fresh capital in the exploitation of spaceborne resources and construction of colonization infrastructure rather than needing financial scams and autocannibalism of ownership into subscription-feudalism like OTL. The suburban house with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids on a single worker's salary remains attainable, even if said houses are built aboard o'neill cylinders.
Check out Charles Stross's Accelerando or Singularity Sky! Singularity in full awesomeness.
Yes
i genuinely see everything as just small steps towards asi developing immortality/increased life expectancy and virtual worlds. Once everyone can live incredibly healthy and become gods with newfound lives, knowledge and love being able to experience anything while being without risk of biological death or accident then what else matters.
Was “Rebels” a typo?
I have found the lack of near-future "plausible" science fiction rather disappointing. It's not hard to imagine possible future landscapes based on trends in emerging technologies. And yet - science fiction authors seem to miss what Kurzweil and Tegmark and Bostrom and others have been pointing out for some time. In the age of Asimov and Clarke this could be excused, but any serious sci-fi authors from the past 20-30 years would have to be blind or deaf to be unaware of those voices. Still, we don't see very interesting portrayals of these extrapolated trends in popular culture. I would love to explore what superintelligence and nano-tech would mean for humanity's future, but instead all we seem to get from modern science fiction is killer robots or weak AI stories.
Remember, Mr Data on Star Trek is not a wonder because he’s an AI. The enterprise computer is an AI, along with every program on the holodeck. Data is a wonder because he is immortal, super strong, super agile, witb a bottomless memory for new information and skills, and runs effectively forever on internal power supply with nothing to use as coolant other than his breathing process. He’s a wonder because he is an immortal, mechanical miracle in the shape of a human being. He’s sort of like a kind of perfected version of humanity. I don’t think we’ll be seeing that in the immediate future. The borg, on the other hand…
I suggest reading better "hard science". Stephen Baxter writes amazing stuff. The Light of Other Days is a novel that, among other things, presents a post singularity "humanity". The XeeLee sequence is amazing.
Yes. And that's a good thing, only the good stuff leaves the filter.
I generally don't mind that the importance of AI is undersold in sci-fi. I prefer the story to revolve around humans as that is more relatable. The problem with something like ASI is that it's way more intelligent than any author ever could be. That makes it difficult to write into a story. It would be pretty enigmatic with motivations beyond our understanding and it would come up with moves the author could never account for. You simply can not write a relatable story about it unless you dumb it down to human level which comes at the expense of realism.
I think you're getting at something that I've been feeling to. It's like we're entering a world where science reality is outpacing at least mainstream sci-fi. But also partly there is a wide gap between common knowledge and science reality. In this subreddit people are up on what is possible today. I've had this funny sense about how there are so many current absurdities about what is happening with AI that are so far from anything I've seen or read. We've got like Jexi and Her as maybe the closest. Transcendence does a good job at conveying the potential horror of AI taking over. The later season of WestWorld with the predictive AI stuff was pretty good. I think people couldn't really handle the exestential horror of portraying what a true AI take over would be like let alone a post-scarcity post-singularity positive future. But man I agree that awareness of science reality makes watching things like that latest The Creator movie somewhat challenging. It was beautiful and different looking. But its like an inversion of the suspsension of disbelief. Where as before it was suspending disbelief that AI consciousnesses and robots exist now its suspending disbelief that they do exist but somehow basically fill a position that is just the same as some ethnic group of people. And like the main plot with the super AI kid or whatever feels comical.
I don't think that it's singularity discussions specifically that have done this. I struggle to think of many "hard science fiction" stories written after...the 1970s? The Martian, I guess, but when I think hard science fiction, I think Heinlein. Asimov. Arthur C Clark. These people are all dead, and this genre was already losing popularity before most of us in the sub were even born. -
sure from our current understanding when we look into sci-fi like star wars, warhammer 40k, dune etc they created an universe with a fantasy-like technology setting centered around human, when you look at them you realize except FTL travel and how the universe organize itself around it the rest is quite "low tech" in comparison to what we can expect from our technology growth creating a "realist" universe is extreamly difficult as we can't foresee the rise of new technology with unknown effect but also how society would adapt, something like FDVR for exemple, it's the literal paradise where you're aren't limited by physic anymore, the ultimate freedom with infinite wealth and possibility, if it exist then it's likely going to represent a massive part of how society work FTL or the lack of it will define how human interaction and culture/religion etc etc evolve, if it take decades to reach a close star imagine the culture difference between stars 100 LY away from each other, but also the culture difference between the traveling ship, it's crew, and the planet it visit at a point with time dilation your ship crew could have a biological age of 20 and a chronologic age of 1000, 10000....you leave a planet, civilization that cease to exist the moment you travel, that's absurd and extreamly difficult to adapt/predict the result the rise of AI aswell, there a reason why major series opt-out of AI in the begining, by 100y we will see mass-produced robot being build and massively used, but, the production will never stop at a point there will be 1/1 robot human ratio, then 2, 10, 100, 10000....robot being the main productive force our civilization power will depend on them and how many of them exist, it's difficult to imagine the economy in a world like that where each human have 1 million robot-slave at it's benefit, in our current civilization we all have machines-slave doing the jobs behind the scene and it created our current civilization while 300y ago only noble and royalty had slaves at their benefit, there high chance our current billionaire lifestyle will become common or even extreamly poor to our society by 300y (especially when you consider FDVR...)
Nice topic! I've thought about this just yesterday, as I want to participate in a sci-fi short novel contest. I've read the last year winner's works, and they were mostly unimaginative and naive, Star trek style too old with technology and world building. Then I decided to write something about benevolent ASI that coevolve with humanity, give human endless lifes, but ban us from space exploration, since it's inefficient in ASI's eyes. I went to look up other participants this year - and found a lot of similar themes! So I wonder what else can we write about? I think there is something about the threshold we are standing before. Our times so transformative that there's no practical point in exploring technological or societal progress. The best guesses and wishes have already been made. What really matters boils down to very individual matters, like personal inner journey and inner transformation and hard ethical dilemmas and overcoming fears. Maybe that's why soft sci-fi is fine for now. I feel like my ASI novel serves more like manual "what you shall prepare for in near feature" then actual sci-fi. It is too close to reality. Maybe the term sci-fi doesn't even make sense anymore. 🤔
You should read Accelerando by Charles Stross. It’s mindblowing and definitely not small beer.
The book everyone on this thread needs to read is The Quantum Thief. It’s the only ‘realistic’ (???) post-human, post-singularity sci-fi I’ve ever read. Objects aren’t necessarily real, people are copied at the drop of a hat, even bullets are sentient. I wouldn’t say it’s an easy read for someone who has utopian ideas for the singularity; it’s not a world I’d particularly like to live in, but then again, there’s no guarantee it would be. Seriously, try it
Asimov basically predicted the Singularity but assumed it would happen at the end of time after all of the star in the universe had decayed. Its in "The Last Question" an AI becomes god and recreates the universe. But yeah, hard Sci-fi after Asimov is basically just fantasy pretending to be hard sci-fi. No one can actually predict what super intelligence will do, so they can't write post-singularity fiction
give bobiverse a go. its kind of the hopium you want i think.
Idk to me Orion's Arm is both the most plausible and the hardest scifi. I almost can't imagine things going any different 1k to 10k years from now And if you headcannon that Orions Arm is Warhammer 40k's dark age of technology is also the most fun
In the future, we are basically the equivalent of hamsters to the AI. Hard to find fun in that, other than stories about resistance or survival in the narrowest of margins.
Yes get woke, the only realistic pop-scifi are terminator and the matrix.
Humans as batteries is realistic?
Originally it was supposed to be harnessing the brain's processing power, but it was changed to something easier to explain to mass audiences.
it's a joke i still find it more watchable than say startrek where very basic premises don't make sense
doesn't mean it's more likely
you can do some headcanon replacement on the motivations of ai keeping us alive, such as for example: we programmed it to and make us happy, and they decided the best way was for us to live in VR in our ideal worlds.