I have a nascent theme about why science fiction may be obsolete, and/or why it’s increasingly less popular than fantasy. All the good ideas are used up; all the good ideas are turning out to be increasingly less plausible; vs how fantasy appeals to basic human nature and its indefatigable beliefs in ghosts and demons and magic and gods. On the second point is what I called five months ago The Most Dangerous Vision, the idea that perhaps all of science fiction’s best ideas are turning out to be obsolete or implausible. Time travel, faster-than-light travel. And now I would say this would be because our speculations about the future and about the universe have been hemmed in by our intuitive thinking that is scale-blind and realm-blind. Without realizing it we ‘flatten’ the universe by thinking everything new and strange must conform to the protocols of human existence. If a person has a father, so must the universe, and so on.
Let’s look at this. (In addition, Lepore was also on KQED’s Forum two days ago, audio and transcript here, concerning her new book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.)
Scientific American, Brianne Kane, yesterday: Silicon Valley reads a lot of science fiction. It often gets it wrong, subtitled “Historian Jill Lepore explains what tech leaders miss in their favorite stories—and why the fight over AI data centers may be where the machine stops”
The story always goes the same way: guy meets girl, guy explains he’s here from the future to stop the robot apocalypse, and guy and girl fall in love and fight off the robot overlords. The end. But historian Jill Lepore is interested in the part that gets skipped: How did the robots get so much power in the first place, and who gave it to them?
In her new nonfiction book The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, out August 25, Lepore traces the long history of a fantasy in which human judgment gives way to systems that promise speed and efficiency. In its modern form, she argues, that fantasy has helped shift power toward machines owned by corporations and the people who run them.
Sci-fi has been imagining versions of that future for more than a century. Now that narrative is colliding with politics as communities fight to stop the proliferation of the enormous data centers going up across the country to support AI. In that resistance, Lepore sees signs of the fall of what she calls the “Artificial State.”
Which is?
I define the Artificial State in the book as both a fantasy of a posthuman world and something that is currently being built: the liberal, democratic, constitutional nation-state is being replaced by an artificial state in which humans do not consent to be governed but are instead governed by machines owned by corporations, owned by people who we did not elect.
Alert for mentions of science fiction.
You write that the Artificial State in science fiction is “nearly always a nightmare.” Are we living in one of those nightmares now?
I find some of the science fiction just terrifyingly prescient. My favorite of these, because I’d never read it before, is a story by E. M. Forster from 1909 called The Machine Stops. It [came out the year after he published A Room with a View,] and I think of it as the room without a view because it’s about a future world in which everything is provided by “the Machine.” Our main character lives in a room that’s just like a cell because she doesn’t need to go anywhere…. One day, the Machine [breaks down]. The protagonist’s son is trying to get his mother to come out and be part of the natural world, but she doesn’t, and everybody dies.
A very famous story that I have not read since 50 years ago. I need to revisit it.
And then to the theme:
You say the architects of the Artificial State read a lot of science fiction, but they read it badly. What are they getting wrong?
I think [sci-fi writer] Ted Chiang had it right. He wrote this great pair of articles a few years ago about the central conceit of the robot-apocalypse story. The idea is that we build these machines and tell them to do something—like [philosopher] Nick Bostrom’s thought experiment in which you task a robot to efficiently, cheaply and quickly maximize the manufacture of paper clips. The robot would eventually kill all the humans because we just get in the way. Also, we have minerals in our bodies that could be useful for the manufacturing of paper clips.
And Chiang is like, now let me think for a minute: What is it in our society that will pursue a goal single-mindedly, relentlessly, ruthlessly, without remorse, without pity for other human beings and to the exclusion of any other sense of accountability in the world? Well, that would be the modern corporation. They’ll destroy a wetland, they’ll cut down a forest, whatever it is. You’re conquering nature to extract its resources in order to manufacture goods. You are the robot in the apocalyptic fiction story.
So Chiang’s thing is, there’s actually no particular reason to think that actual robots would act this way, except that they’re being programmed by the people that run corporations that work this way.
And:
Which writers should they be reading instead?
I did a podcast about Elon Musk and I spent a whole episode on all the science fiction that none of these guys ever read, like Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Ted Chiang. They want to read Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—not that there’s no difference between Heinlein and Asimov—but they want to read these libertarian people from the 1950s that were writing about rockets and robots and flying cars.
So, stepping away from the article, here’s the thing: science fiction evolves too; science fiction reflects the era in which it was written, and the plausibility of the ideas of science fiction changes too. Heinlein and Asimov reflect a different era.
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That was one substantial item. But I can’t let this kibble go. It’s the current reality.
He’s insane.
- JMG, today, from Fox News: Trump: I Might Rename Atlantic And Pacific Oceans
- Robert Reich, today: The Naked Trump, subtitled “A thin-skinned, peevish, petty, incompetent, corrupt infant”
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- The Atlantic, Duncan Hosie, today: The Supreme Court Isn’t Interested in Facts
- Subtitled: “In decision after decision, the conservative justices are ignoring the evidentiary record that lower courts have worked hard to establish.”
- In other words, it’s becoming more and more conservative.
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- ICE wants torture devices that leave no mark.
- AP News, today: ICE awards $16.7M contract to buy 6,000 pairs of gloves that deliver electric shocks
- This is where we are, America.
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And that’s enough for tonight. But I’ll note that I finished listening to this:
And I’ll note, while I think this is one of greatest symphonies of all time, that the conductor in this case, in addition to signaling to the orchestra when to chime in, is also signalling, by his body language, to the audience what is important and how to respond. Even if they can’t see his face. Not all conductors do that. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a live performance from Michael Tilson Thomas, but after seeing this I appreciate him especially.
