We recognize aspects of other fictional futures.
It is possible to earn credit "'...over and above the basic issue.'" (p. 39) (It sounds as if everyone is secure and there is also room for initiative and creativity.)
Treatments, therapies, regenerations and somatics are used to delay aging. (In some futures, of course, aging is prevented.)
Important decisions are made by machine intelligences of which the summit is Terra Central. (In Anderson's Harvest of Stars Tetralogy, the Teramind.)
Laurinda thinks that the world not only is but always was too complex for human beings to understand or control. Susan Calvin thinks likewise at the end of Asimov's I, Robot when the giant robotic Brains control the global economy and ecology. I, Robot looks forward to a robot-controlled future that does not come to pass because, in the sequel, the Brains, having judged that the highest human good is self-determination, have phased themselves out unlike Anderson's post-organics.
3 comments:
Even if we understood our own minds and how they interact to make a humans society, it would still be impossible to 'control' either in any meaningful sense, because they are not deterministic.
NB: the Earth-ruling AI does something fairly similar to the Brains when it recreates human beings.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Falling behind again. For four months after being discharged from the rehabilitation hospital last September, I was able to keep up with the blog. Much harder now since I started going back to work in late January.
Like Stirling I have very strong doubts it will be possible to "control" human affairs in any Utopian way. To say nothing of how skeptical I am of it being possible to get AIs of the kind we see in GENESIS. But I don't object to PA examining such ideas!
Mr. Stirling: We do see the Gaia AI from GENESIS differeing from Asimov's Brains in one way: unlike the latter, the Gaia AI does not commit suicide!
Ad astra! Sean
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