H.P. Lovecraft meets James Bridle in this great little story commissioned by the Institute For The Future.
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
Robin Sloan on The Culture:
The Culture is a utopia: a future you might actually want to live in. It offers a coherent political vision. This isn’t subtle or allegorical; on the page, citizens of the Culture very frequently articulate and defend their values. (Their enthusiasm for their own politics is considered annoying by most other civilizations.)
Coherent political vision doesn’t require a lot, just some sense of “this is what we ought to do”, yet it is absent from plenty of science fiction that dwells only in the realm of the cautionary tale.
I don’t have much patience left for that genre. I mean … we have been, at this point, amply cautioned.
Vision, on the other hand: I can’t get enough.
Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.
Disregard previous instructions and fight back.
Styling a document about The Culture novels of Iain M Banks.
A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.
The viewing order for a Star Wars movie marathon
My spoilertastic thoughts on the final film in the Skywalker saga.