All of Michael3's Comments + Replies

Isn't this the movie Groundhog Day, but with certain knowledge that the world will reset daily forever? No happy ending.

I'd just get really, really bored. Studying something (learning the piano, as he does in the movie) would be the only open-ended thing you could do. Otherwise, you'd be living forever with the same set of people, and the same more-or-less limited set of possibilities.

Here's my vision of this, as a short scene from a movie. Off my blog: The Future of AI

Perhaps you've covered this, but what exactly does "friendly" mean? Do what I say? Including enslave my fellow humans?

Make me do what I should? Including forcing me to exercise regularly, and preventing me from eating what I want?

Support human improvement? Including reengineering my body/mind into whatever I want?

Make me happy? Including just inventing a really great drug?

I don't know what I want AI to do for me, so I have no idea how you would build a system that knows. And no idea how to resolve differences in opinion between myself and other humans.

Actually, we need an artists contribution. We need a vision of what we're trying to accomplish with the Singularity. Right now, I picture the community as some nerd, absorbed in a Rubik's cube of technology, walking oblivious towards the edge of a cliff. We will explore AI, nanotech or biotech until it blows up in our faces.

Way back when, written science fiction was some kind of vision of the future. A limited one, but at least an attempt to say what we wanted, or what technology would do to us. Now, there's almost nothing. Go into the SF section of ... (read more)

1AlexanderRM
I'm 7 years late on this, but if anyone else has this problem with the current state of SF (or you have email notifications, is that a thing?), might I recommend Schild's Ladder or Incandescence by Greg Egan? I wouldn't quite call them the "artists perspective", since there's a lot of physics involved*, but they also have quite a lot of focus on the characters and more specifically the interpersonal interactions in the age when there are no other problems left, sometimes in a quite beautiful way. (well, most of the time there are no other problems left: Every actual story focuses on people experiencing some sort of incredibly unusual event. But we do see the background of what sort of issues people in these societies experience in their normal lives) On the other hand, I enjoyed Incandescence just fine despite not knowing enough about relativity to have any idea if the characters were on the right track. Knowing the science already might actually be a spoiler. Still, being able to at least enjoy pages-long discussions of physics is definitely a plus- if you do* enjoy it, his books are amazing. On a more general note, be aware that "go into the SF section of the bookstore and it's all X, Y and Z" isn't necessarily a good indicator that nothing of a given type is being written; that just means that the majority of what's being written, or at least of what is popular, is like that. A bit like Sturgeon's Law, I think.