> The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories.
> The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.
Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they didn't communicate regularly with.
To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable."
(And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful insights from it.")
Doctors and scientists have believed false things en masse before, sometimes for hundreds of years at a time. You are confessing to an inability to imagine the real history of the very social practices (science and medicine) that you see yourself as somehow defending here.
Step 2: 100 years pass
Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines.
Was that so hard?
Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired.
Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)
Post global nuclear war reconstruction would really benefit from having even a simple spreadsheet program to aid with resource allocation, wouldn’t it?
During a nuclear war reconstruction scenario, computing wouldn't be seen as ancient or unchanging. We'd be in a transitory period where we try and recreate computing infrastructure with what we have and the power sources we have access to. But we wouldn't develop an ancient tradition or anything.
A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve tooling and processes. This creates circular dependencies that make our civilization non-restartable.
As a toy example, imagine we made tool A, which let us create tool B, which let us, among other things, upgrade A to A'. A' can still produce B, but can also produce upgraded B'. B' obviously lets us make A'', but also C', and A'' + C' let us make B''. Rinse, repeat for a hundred years. The result is that the whole industry relies on tools A'''''''''' and B''''''''''. The hobbyists still play with A and B, maybe even A' and B', but there's nothing between A' and A'''''''''' in actual use or production, nor anyone who remembers their design, because they've all been made obsolete long ago. If the calamity hits, and we can no longer make new A'''''''''' and B'''''''''', we don't get to downgrade a step or two - we go back all the way to A' and B'. And all the other tools and technologies that also relied on our advanced capacity - they all stop working and go "back to beginning" in lock step.
B. Making and operating tools involves ever increasing energy use.
C. We've used up all easily-available high-density energy sources long ago. Both our renewable tech and our fossil fuel mining and combustion processes are A''''''''''-level tech.
With that in mind, it's not that big of a stretch to write a plausible backstory for a culture as described in the article.
And if things are so low tech, the long-distance communication would be far more impressive than the story suggests!
It seems almost certain that climate change is going to severely disrupt several of these cycles in decade or two, and a slightly different failure mode of what you allude to in C. is that our tech and processes become capped before we adequately scale up renewables, and overshoot kicks in and it's actually a negative feedback loop that certainly doesn't just stop with computers.
I reckon the primary means of computing for the lay person becomes interacting with prompts to make the computer do what you want, but the actual knowledge of software engineering and computer science is gone. Even the prompts, due to linguistic evolution, are in a language that regular people don't understand and people's mastery of the language is akin to moderns trying to reconstruct something like Akkadian. We sort of know what specific words mean and the general grammar, but we simply don't know 90% of the vocabulary to express most ideas. Whatever the language model was populated on training data from an archaic language and is also full of weird idioms and phrases and misspellings that we can't reconstruct in an organized way.
In this context, the computers might be able to solve some basic problems for us, but everything we do with them is basically just received incantations from other crusty old people. Innovations keep happening, but they're small scale and mostly revolve around finding out new ways to tweak the incantations to do novel things. But the most we can do is say, like, "draw a picture" or "sort this list."
Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of retro components or things to replace the retro components (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records, etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply needs to be scavenged.
So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the things we are doing with some new technology that is not digital silicon based computers that run on electricity. But there will be edges where the new technology is not compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this kind of speculation.
This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers.
Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.
The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...
https://www.livingcomputers.org/
https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S...
Hell deep in the chip shortage I talked with more than one person that were buying up electronics at thrift shops and ebay that they knew contained chips they could not source at the time.
So it's kind of frustrating - in effect, the author describes a thought experiment of how society would change if X happened, but without saying anything at all about that X other than asserting that one of the things X causes is a mysterious lack of interest in using computers to fill needs/desires which (at least according to the original article) aren't filled by some better alternative.
You assert it's incoherent. That's part of the point: it's incoherent with your current understanding of our current world. There might be other circumstances that lead to a world that isn't incoherent. If the conclusions in a piece of speculative fiction are appealing, it may be worth thinking of what it takes to reach those conclusions.
The thought exercise of trying to make it coherent is part of the point.
The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.
Only weird old people would bother to learn how to program dumb desktop computers.
I feel their disquiet is misplaced. Any young, fast-moving field is going to be full of the same issues that software is in now. You can look back at the history of mechanical engineering during the industrial revolution to see many similar problems we had with unsafe projects, hyped-up snake oil, or iteration for the sake of iteration. The history of automobiles and aviation was also marked by similar issues. Slower paced engineering fields are more mature and have gone through decades or centuries of iteration before coming up with tried and true solutions. But fundamentally fiction speaks to the soul more than it speaks to any measurable outcome. Truly the only fix for this disquiet is to search inside rather than look out. Fiction can be a great tool for that.
One word: Terminals.
Computers are inherently old at this point, the technology harkens back at least the better part of a century.
The old guard in particular cannot and will not let go of CLIs and esoteric flags and arguments, and will berate anyone who would dare suggest anything concerning a GUI.
To them, the only human interfaces that exist are the keyboard and the monochrome monitor, computing is still grey-on-black (or green/orange-on-black) monospace text and running emacs or vim. The rest of the world disregards them as living relics of ancient history.
Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting a global belief in the community isomorphic to the alteration. You haven't altered the culture. You'd just asserted a group of unthinking zombies.
So when I read:
> Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
I can't conceive of such a world. Its incoherent. I also can't imagine a world where no one likes metals for whatever reason. You can't just assert a fact like that and press play. It's nonsensical.