Re:How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?
by Animats on Friday November 06, 2026 @02:13AM
(#50389161)
As to prediction, there were some accurate early hits. A Logic Named Joe nailed the search engine with a chatbot front end, and pointed out the problems of systems smart enough to tell people in detail how to do bad stuff.
Much early SF thinking was that AIs would be logical. That's what I was taught, going through Stanford back when the logicians were in charge. They were trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus. That turned out to be totally wrong.
Almost everybody in SF underestimated the difficulty of robot unstructured manipulation.
So did people in AI. They still do. Most SF assumed that robots would be able to do
most eye/hand tasks before they could talk. No. Still unsolved. LLMs don't seem to help all that much. Written language doesn't have much info on grasping, and watching without doing is only marginally helpful.
Asimov's robot novels were all about alignment, and why alignment is hard. That was prophetic.
Banks' Culture novels are great, but they're for a future that has a lot of new physics.
Now what? What we seem to be headed for in the near term is the fast automation of most white collar work, but not blue collar work. SF foresaw that future a few times. One example is the Rosinante Trilogy from 1981, where there's a boss of an orbital space colony, an AI as middle management, and union labor doing the real work. That's a hard SF view. There's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, from 2010, where the protagonist's supervisor is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low." It's a minor part of the comedic plot there. And, of course, there's Manna, from 2003, which is looking all too likely.
Much early SF thinking was that AIs would be logical. That's what I was taught, going through Stanford back when the logicians were in charge. They were trying to hammer the real world into predicate calculus. That turned out to be totally wrong.
Almost everybody in SF underestimated the difficulty of robot unstructured manipulation. So did people in AI. They still do. Most SF assumed that robots would be able to do most eye/hand tasks before they could talk. No. Still unsolved. LLMs don't seem to help all that much. Written language doesn't have much info on grasping, and watching without doing is only marginally helpful.
Asimov's robot novels were all about alignment, and why alignment is hard. That was prophetic.
Banks' Culture novels are great, but they're for a future that has a lot of new physics.
Now what? What we seem to be headed for in the near term is the fast automation of most white collar work, but not blue collar work. SF foresaw that future a few times. One example is the Rosinante Trilogy from 1981, where there's a boss of an orbital space colony, an AI as middle management, and union labor doing the real work. That's a hard SF view. There's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, from 2010, where the protagonist's supervisor is "Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 with passive-aggressive set to low." It's a minor part of the comedic plot there. And, of course, there's Manna, from 2003, which is looking all too likely.