Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment

Re:Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment by Karrot_Kream on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:53PM (#35048209)

This breaks immersion for a lot of people, me included. It's one of the biggest issues I have with lots of sci-fi (moreso than most other types of speculative fiction) novels. Just asserting a fact this fundamental and building your world around it only works if societies, culture, technologies, and history are build around it. Humanity's history with tools and automation are millenia old. To alter this would require a lot of changes. We've been automating, forgetting, copying, and maintaining technologies for as long as our history.

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.

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Re:Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment by jhbadger on Monday March 06, 2023 @05:01PM (#35048317)

To some degree I agree with your last point. Before the idea of aliens, writers like Plato and Thomas Moore would posit some undiscovered island where they could imagine a culture unlike their own existing, which like with aliens, gave plausibility as to why that culture would have a different history and traditions than their own. Of course they, like many speculative writers today, were really writing about how they wished their own society worked.

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Re:Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment by pmarreck on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @12:44PM (#35058454)

Hmmm. Good observations. I hope this doesn't break my interest in the Warhammer universe, lol, which I believe probably suffer from a lacking "origin story"

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