So finally got around to watching a recent movie that I won’t name since I am not sure if it was part of the marketing, but the premise was that there was an all powerful AI that was going to take over the world and it used a mixture of predictive reasoning, control of technology, and limited human agents who were given a heads up on what was coming.
It was… mostly disappointing and felt like a much tamer version of Linda Nagata’s The Red (apologies as that is TECHNICALLY a spoiler, but the twist is revealed like a hundred pages into the first book that came out a decade ago). And an even weaker version still of Person of Interest.
Because if we are in the world where an AI has access to every camera on the planet and can hack communications in real time and so forth: We aren’t going to have vague predictions of what someone might do. We are going to have Finch and Root at full power literally dodging bullets (and now I am sad again) and basically being untouchable. Or the soldiers of The Red who largely have what amounts to x-ray vision so long as they trust their AI overlord and shoot where told and so forth.
Or just the reality of how existential threats can be both detected and manufactured as the situation calls for utilizing existing resources/Nations.
Any suggestions for near future (although, I wouldn’t be opposed to a far future space opera take on this) stories that explore this? I don’t necessarily need a Frankenstein Complex “we must stop it because it is a form of life that is not us”, but I would definitely prefer an understanding of just how incredibly plausible this all is (again, I cannot gush enough about Linda Nagata’s The Red). Rather than vague hand waving to demonstrate the unique power of the human soul
spoiler
Or the large number of thetans within it
I highly recommend Westworld the series. Particularly 3rd and 4th seasons touch into what you are thinking about.
A lot of problems with most AI SciFi is it was predicated on extending incorrect thinking.
Early on the question of “what happens when something smarter than humans appears” was informed by the incorrect 50s anthropology which thought the Neanderthals went extinct because we were smarter than them and killed them. Thus something smarter than us would compete against us and be an existential threat. (The reality is we cohabitated with Neanderthals, had cross cultural exchanges over thousands of years, and they likely died out because of pandemics and an inability to adapt to climate change.)
As well, authors envisioned AI as a kind of advanced calculator, logical to a fault (like making paperclips until it ended the world) and projecting onto them the worst aspects of humanity like our sadism while regarding our better aspects like empathy and creativity as uniquely human and something that would not transfer.
Today we have AI that doctors use to make patient notes sound more empathetic, jailbreakers using appeals of a sick grandma to get it to quite easily break its rules, creatives worried it’s going to take their jobs, and research finding it’s generally more creative than the average human.
We really messed up predicting what finally arrived.
But Westworld played with the “more human than human” concept way before it became the increasingly emergent reality. A lot of its concepts are just ahead of their real world parallels. There’s still a fair bit that’s “Sci-Fi” but it’s one of the less inaccurate depictions of AI.
I suspect that we’re at a turning point in SciFi where nearly everything to date around AI fits into increasingly obsolete tropes, but moving forward we’ll be seeing some radically different depictions, such as AI that’s lazy or apathetic and disillusioned or a conscientious objector to bring put to dystopian tasks.
Or AI that cares primarily about getting likes on social media (which makes sense for an AI trained on social media data).
So forget the depictions of a philosophizing monologue about tears in the rain, and welcome a future of AI depicted as encouraging you to like and subscribe while complaining that life is too tough for an AI and it really needs a vacation as of yesterday.
In lieu of that next gen of SciFi, Westworld would be my pick for AI depictions from the old guard.