We Are Living In The Age of Science-Fiction

A short essay.

Science-fiction is a literary genre that concerns itself with the future. But what is the role of science-fiction when technological progress feels faster than ever?

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Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

— Isaac Asimov

During a recent interview, James Cameron, Canadian filmmaker, said he struggled with completing his script for Terminator 7. Not because he’s too busy, but because he finds it hard to come up with ideas that won’t be overtaken by real events in the near future.

He’s echoing a sentiment that I myself, and many others, have been experiencing. The stories that we used to tell ourselves are rapidly becoming reality.

Take the movie Her (2013), for example, in which a man falls hopelessly in love with his voice assistant. Farfetched then, the present has already caught up, as millions of people are engaged in romantic relationships with ChatGPT and other AI companions.

You could say we’re living in the Age of Science Fiction.

The purpose of science fiction is often misunderstood

In the foreword to Encyclopedia of science fiction (1978), Isaac Asimov, quite possibly the greatest science-fiction writer who ever lived, writes:

Through all of history, science and technology did advance and did, in so doing, alter society. However, those changes progressed so slowly in time and spread so slowly in space that, within an individual’s own lifetime, no change was visible. Hence, human history — barring trivial changes through war and dynastic succession, or fantasy changes through supernatural intervention — was viewed as essentially static.

The advance of science and technology, however, is cumulative, and each advance tends to encourage a more rapid further advance. Eventually, the rate of change, and the extent of the effect of that change on society, becomes great enough to be detected in the space of an individual lifetime. The future is then, for the first time, discovered.

This took place, clearly, with the development of the Industrial Revolution. It makes sense, then, to suppose that science fiction had to be born some time after 1800 and most likely in Great Britain, and that its birth came about as the literary response to this discovery. Brian Aldiss considers Frankenstein, published in Great Britain in 1818, to be the first true science fiction story and I tend to agree with him.

(…)

Since the Industrial Revolution first made the perception of change through technology clear, the rate has continued to increase, until now the wind of change has risen from a zephyr to a hurricane. It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be — and naturally this means that there must be an accurate perception of the world as it will be. This, in turn, means that our statesmen, our businessmen, our everyman must take on a science fictional way of thinking, whether he likes it or not, or even whether he knows it or not. Only so can the deadly problems of today be solved.

Wise words. Prescient. Given they were jotted down in the 70’s, before PCs, the Internet or mobile phones were invented.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with Asimov’s short stories. He’d portray robots very differently from the authors that came before him — more fallible, imperfect, and idiosyncratic.

This is best illustrated by The Bicentennial Man (1976), in which a household robot is brought into an American home. The daughter, Little Miss, names him Andrew. She asks the robot to carve a pendant out of wood, and impressed by his skill and creativity, Little Miss and her father have Andrew carve more.

The father proceeds to help Andrew to sell his products, taking half the profits and putting the other half in a bank account for him (because as a robot Andrew can’t legally own a bank account). He uses the money to pay for bodily upgrades, keeping himself in perfect shape, but never touches his positronic brain.

As the years pass by, Andrew outlives the family that raised him. He begins to wear human clothes, despite not feeling accepted by society; gets U.S. Robotics, the company that made him, to provide him with a more android-like body; and becomes a well-respected inventor, specializing in organic prosthetics for humans.

The prosthetics allow him to replace his own mechanic parts with organic ones. For Andrew, this isn’t enough. He starts a legal procedure to ask the World Legislature to declare him a human being. The legislators are initially hesitant, given the fact that Andrew is immortal. So in a final alteration to his body, he has his brain modified so it decays with time. It will shut down completely when he turns two-hundred years old.

Finally, on Andrew’s two-hundredth birthday, he’s officially declared human and he dies.

You might be wondering why I’m telling you this story, which I encourage you to read in full. The reason for it is that Asimov observed something that has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with human nature. He understood that we, as people, shape technology in our own image. And considering where we are today — with AI chatbots that successfully mimic human behavior, convincing certain people it’s alive and conscious — it has become abundantly clear to me that the future Asimov once imagined has in fact arrived.

The dream of thinking machines, AGI, and superintelligence

To be clear, none of this happened by accident. For those who don’t know, the field of artificial intelligence was founded on the premise that we can create thinking machines with general intelligence comparable to, or greater than, that of human beings.

It all began with a “summer research project” by a handful of researchers, held on the campus of Dartmouth College, in 1957. All men.

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence is widely considered the event that kicked off AI as a research discipline. Organized by John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester, it brought together a few dozen of the leading thinkers in AI, computer science, and information theory.

In the original proposal, they write:

The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

It would take longer than a summer, or two, or three. Yet, a powerful idea had taken hold. A dream that continues to propel, fuel, and inspire scientists and engineers even after seven decades. A dream to emulate human intelligence. To recreate it.

This is what Asimov saw and communicated through his stories. We are the mold our robots are shaped after. Computers, chatbots, artificial intelligence — it’s all man-made.

This is further evidenced by how today’s AI systems are created. First they’re trained on everything human — literary works, images, art, and video’s. Then a staggering amount of human labor is involved in what we’ve come to known as ‘post-training’. To get a sense of the scale, Elon Musk’s start up xAI laid off 500 general AI tutors last week, and is now 10X-ing their Specialist AI tutor team. These are people who ‘teach’ the chatbot how to behave and respond.

Does that essentially mean AI is Stone Soup? And are the stories about AGI and superintelligence merely a product of magical thinking?

Maybe. But some folks genuinely believe superintelligence is nigh. I can point to various works, like ‘Situational Awareness’ by Leopold Aschenbrenner, ‘Project AI 2027’, or ‘A Worthy Successor’ by Dan Faggella.

A question that naturally arises from that is: What would our relationship with a powerful entity like that be? Something smarter than us in every way? In an interview with Sam Altman, the highly controversial conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson displayed a level of critical thinking that I didn’t know he was capable of, calling AI a religion and comparing it to God. An invisible, all-knowing, all-powerful entity that we can look for guidance to. Pretty accurate!

An even gloomier worldview is held by the so-called ‘AI doomers’. People like by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, who just published a book titled ‘If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies’.

They conceptualize superintelligence more like an evil monster, envisioning a dark, violent trajectory for humanity.

Their worldview reminds me of that of H.P. Lovecraft. In the short story, The Call of Cthulhu (1928), a mythical monster is summoned. But rereading the famous first paragraph of that story, I cannot help but imagine it being about an unaligned, dangerously powerful AI:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

If you think this all sounds farfetched, don’t be mistaken; superintelligence is the talk of the town in Silicon Valley.

And even if we reject the idea of a godlike entity, we must at the very least accept that we’ve already succeeded at building machines that we no longer fully comprehend.

Humanity’s chapters are still to be written

Now, no one can predict the future, not even science-fiction writers. They get it wrong all the time. But the goal isn’t to be right. The purpose of sci-fi has never been to be right.

Sometimes the point is to conceive of worlds we don’t want; the worlds that look like bleak, depressing Black Mirror-episodes. Sometimes the point is to entertain an idea just for the sake of entertaining an idea. And sometimes the point is saying something true about the who we are as a species, whatever our destiny may be.

In search of destiny, a word that refers both to fate and a place in the future, I’d like to return one last time to Asimov. Specifically, to a short story titled ‘The Last Question’ (1956), which he thought was the best thing he’d ever written and I tend to agree. It spans trillions of years in the space of a few pages and features an Oracle-type supercomputer, Multivac, which has successfully harnessed solar energy and allowed mankind to reach beyond the stars.

One day, two technicians decide to ask Multivac if entropy can be reversed. The computer responds: “insufficient data for a meaningful answer”. Something that has never happened before.

Many years laters, a family is space-traveling to a different planet after Earth has become too crowded. The father turns to Microvac, a pocket version of Multivac, encouraged by his children to ask it if stars can be turned on again, once they run out. The computer responds again: “insufficient data for a meaningful answer”.

More time passes. Millions of years. Man, now a collective embodiment of human consciousness, oversees a dying universe. Cosmic AC, a far descendent of Multivac, has stored enough energy to last billions of years but Man still wonders if entropy can be reversed. No answer.

Finally, only AC remains. The stars and Galaxies and life itself have disappeared; space has grown black after tens of trillion of years of running down. The only thing left for AC is to answer the last question. What follows is the sublime, final paragraph of the story:

A timeless interval was spent in doing that.

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”

And there was light —

Always keep imagining,

— Jurgen