(EDITED: Crap. I included the key pic from the key research in the first draft of this comment, and then the site’s software put my comment “close to the OP, with the OP not rolled out” and so the OP would be spoiled by the comment? Apologies. Hopefully with this edit to remove the pic from the comment things work better?)
This series is great! Please keep going!
It reminds me of some of the “best bits” from Accelerando, back in the day, when Stross was clearly alluding to ideas from actual published work by people trying to understand brains and learning algorithms and so on. Some parts of the novel were practically “a new allusion every paragraph” and the density of them caused me to laugh, which I take to be a positive some of like… uh… something interesting and probably good?
Also, more seriously, it is plausible that this very text might end up in GPT-N’s language models. If the language models have a coherent literary concept of short sweet narratives describing obvious failure modes, that might be helpful? Like… in the actual future there will probably be engineers who re-use libraries very quickly to hit deadlines with high enough quality that the QA team can’t instantly detect the problems. That “hurried productive iterative pragmatic chaos”-feeling is in these stories, and feels true to life.
Thank you for the kind words and the image. I tried and failed to locate the image while writing this story. I’m glad readers can see it now. I tried embedding your image under a spoiler tag but the spoiler tag only blocks text. Images go right through it. The link will have to do.
I didn’t know Stross based his early work on published science. The earliest of his stories I read was Saturn’s Children which seemed to be an allusion to Asimov’s robot stories and Heinlein’s Friday.
I mean… like… “the Lobsters” in Accelerando (who ultimately end up being highly similar to humans compared to the very weird “Vile Offspring”, and altruistically are able to help us a bit with escaping, after humans are essentially deported from Earth and so on) were, I’m pretty sure, based on a hypothetical extension of work vaguely like this? (There’s a specific study where someone did the crude but serviceable first cell of a Moravec Upload, but on a Lobster, that I wanted to link to but can’t instantly find anymore.)
I can’t remember all the allusions, but parts of that novel were very dense with these kinds of things :-)
My understanding is that Stross held (still holds (dunno: haven’t checked in a while)) singularitarians in mild contempt, and just harvested a bunch of “our memes” and threw them back at us in a book aiming to insultingly pander to us. If that’s what happened, I’m fine with it! Such high quality pandering is ok by me <3
I think over time he came up with larger audiences to insultingly pander to, where I could see the pandering more easily, but not notice as many collected allusions to interesting research? C’est la vie.
I remember that example!
(EDITED: Crap. I included the key pic from the key research in the first draft of this comment, and then the site’s software put my comment “close to the OP, with the OP not rolled out” and so the OP would be spoiled by the comment? Apologies. Hopefully with this edit to remove the pic from the comment things work better?)
This series is great! Please keep going!
It reminds me of some of the “best bits” from Accelerando, back in the day, when Stross was clearly alluding to ideas from actual published work by people trying to understand brains and learning algorithms and so on. Some parts of the novel were practically “a new allusion every paragraph” and the density of them caused me to laugh, which I take to be a positive some of like… uh… something interesting and probably good?
Also, more seriously, it is plausible that this very text might end up in GPT-N’s language models. If the language models have a coherent literary concept of short sweet narratives describing obvious failure modes, that might be helpful? Like… in the actual future there will probably be engineers who re-use libraries very quickly to hit deadlines with high enough quality that the QA team can’t instantly detect the problems. That “hurried productive iterative pragmatic chaos”-feeling is in these stories, and feels true to life.
Thank you for the kind words and the image. I tried and failed to locate the image while writing this story. I’m glad readers can see it now. I tried embedding your image under a spoiler tag but the spoiler tag only blocks text. Images go right through it. The link will have to do.
I didn’t know Stross based his early work on published science. The earliest of his stories I read was Saturn’s Children which seemed to be an allusion to Asimov’s robot stories and Heinlein’s Friday.
I mean… like… “the Lobsters” in Accelerando (who ultimately end up being highly similar to humans compared to the very weird “Vile Offspring”, and altruistically are able to help us a bit with escaping, after humans are essentially deported from Earth and so on) were, I’m pretty sure, based on a hypothetical extension of work vaguely like this? (There’s a specific study where someone did the crude but serviceable first cell of a Moravec Upload, but on a Lobster, that I wanted to link to but can’t instantly find anymore.)
I can’t remember all the allusions, but parts of that novel were very dense with these kinds of things :-)
My understanding is that Stross held (still holds (dunno: haven’t checked in a while)) singularitarians in mild contempt, and just harvested a bunch of “our memes” and threw them back at us in a book aiming to insultingly pander to us. If that’s what happened, I’m fine with it! Such high quality pandering is ok by me <3
I think over time he came up with larger audiences to insultingly pander to, where I could see the pandering more easily, but not notice as many collected allusions to interesting research? C’est la vie.