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ok I know this wasn't really the point of your essay. but im beginning to realize it's my duty to tell people this: the AI thing is not fake and overblown. it is in fact only going to get smarter and more central to our lives so it would be nice if science fiction authors would take it more seriously. actually.

what we have now is a bunch of people looking at the automobile and not even bothering to try to predict the traffic jam. but being like "it's simply a faster horse"

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Mar 5Author

Appreciate the pushback, and I hear you. I'm personally pretty agnostic on this stuff. I don't dispute that these things are powerful, weird, impactful, and will likely be all over the future. I think sci-fi writers are more trying to distinguish these products from the tropes about AI common in SF, which I think were pretty different and likely have different implications. Or maybe not! Could be things go that way soon.

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Cheers, yeah thanks for hearing me. To me the most weird and interesting thing about it all is that the machines are trained on language, which means they're trained on tropes. including sci-fi. so in some sense they are more likely to follow the pattern set by those stories than we should expect by default! higher order torment Nexus effect lol

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