| This is very interesting coming from an author in whose writing autonomous, super-powerful AIs have been a common theme. Consider his book Accelerando (which I'll take the opportunity to plug again, especially as he's made available for free here: http://www.accelerando.org/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.h...) Not only did I find it quite engaging and thought-provoking, it is also proving rather prescient, and even helpful in decoding some of the things that are happening today. For instance, in the very first chapter the protagonist spawns agents to go research something in the background and report back to him. And then a year ago, I randomly became curious about a rather involved topic (how fast could we feasibly replace all human labor with robotics), but I did not want to spend time researching so I outsourced it to Google Deep Research which churned away for almost half an hour and came back with a 30 page report with 49 citations via "actual internet searches for verifiable sources." (If you're curious about the conclusion: not for a very long time partly due to critical supply chain constraints.) After I went through the report, it suddenly struck me: my agent may have executed in a GPU cloud instead of a cybernetic brain, but holy crap I had literally just lived a SciFi scene! A scene that I did not expect to experience in my lifetime! Which is why I found TFA a bit unexpected. TFA says a few things that I would disagree with. Like, no, AI is not a "stochastic parrot" and I'd assume he'd be primed to realize it. And AI is not competing with authors -- other authors with AI are, and using AI trained on real text to aid writing has been a thing since the days of red squiggly lines in word processors, which TFA even acknowledges. If you see his last few comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross) it's clear he's pretty negative on the tech industry and Capitalism, which I tend to agree with. I can see how that could color his thinking. That may also mean he's avoided LLMs to the extent that he is not aware what the frontier models have become. I would encourage him to put aside his distate and re-engage with them deeply; maybe he'd be at least a little bit excited to see some of his writing turn out to be prophetic in some good ways besides the bad. |