Science Fiction and AI: the illusions of the writers
APR 16, 2024
∙ PAID
A number of famous science fiction writers have deployed technocratic ideas/ideals in their work, when they describe future civilizations:
HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, AE van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Aldous Huxley.
Many writers present robots equipped with AI brains.
George Lucas (Star Wars) did up his robots to appeal to adults and kiddies who love CUTE.
Maybe the greatest science fiction film ever made—Blade Runner—was far more subtle and slippery. The five or six robots (“replicants”) basically felt they’d been short changed. They yearned to be fully human. They were almost there, but not quite. They were angry about their built-in termination dates.
Blade Runner perfectly embodies the basic illusion you find in most science fiction: “robots are conscious.”
They’re not.
And there’s no way to make them conscious.
AI can’t be made conscious.
If a robot “wants to be human,” that’s just another piece of its programming. It’s added to…
Give humans the IMPRESSION that these ROBOT THINGS are conscious.
I have yet to read or watch a work of science fiction that tried to describe a civilization in which robots made to SEEM conscious were injected wholesale into society.
THAT takes a different version of imagination.
The author can’t rely on, for example:
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