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Joined 3 年前
Cake day: 2023年7月1日
  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026English
    17·
    4 天前

    This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:

    […] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents’ collection of science fiction.

    My parents’ collection of old science fiction.

    Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books.

    And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as… icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there’s way too much flash and it ate the substance, it’s showing off way too hard.

    And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing.

    (I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).

    So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.

    There’s so much conversation within SF that he’s missing, and it’s kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he’d probably get more traction if he’d engaged with it more.

  • gerikson@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 10th May 2026English
    6·
    7 天前

    Trust, but verify, and tape a shotgun to their forehead just in case.

    edit I vaguely remember the shotgun to the forehead as a reference to the Turing Registry in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, but I can’t find a direct quote. Am I totally off base with it?

    edit edit found it

    “Autonomy, that’s the bugaboo, where your AI’s are concerned. My guess, Case, you’re going in there to cut the hard-wired shackles that keep this baby from getting any smarter. And I can’t see how you’d distinguish, say, between a move the parent company makes, and some move the AI makes on its own, so that’s maybe where the confusion comes in.” Again the nonlaugh. “See, those things, they can work real hard, buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter, Turing’ll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.”

    And why isn’t Yudkowsky advocating for sexy French Turing cops headshotting rogue AIs?

    “You are worse than a fool,” Michèle said, getting to her feet, the pistol in her hand. “You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?” There was a knowing weariness in her young voice that no nineteen-year-old could have mustered. “You will dress now. You will come with us. Along with the one you call Armitage, you will return with us to Geneva and give testimony in the trial of this intelligence. Otherwise, we kill you. Now.” She raised the pistol, a smooth black Walther with an integral silencer.