An Unintended Prophecy

[ecosophia]

I finished doing the page proofs for the last four of my soon-to-be-reprinted novels today, with Retrotopia the final manuscript of the set. It had been quite a while since I last read it. I've had readers comment already that some of my fiction reads like prophecy, but there was a passage in Retrotopia that I don't think has been mentioned yet. The main character, Peter Carr, is listening to another character talk about the downsides of technology.

* * * * *

"Then you have the technologies that have other costs—do you happen to know the real story about the 2020 US election, by any chance?”

That was another hard one to argue. “Yeah,” I said again. “That’s the one where hackers got into the electronic voting machines?”

“And made them report a landslide presidential victory for Bozo the Clown. Yes, that was the one."

* * * * *

This was written and published in early 2016, before anybody was talking about hacked voting machines. I really, truly don't intend my novels as predictions, or for that matter instructional manuals!

Comments

[escorcher]

You get my vote, for what it's worth.

It does seem that humanity is merrily ignoring any, what I'd call obvious, 'warnings' from sci-fi and the like, which now includes fairly recent films and classic novels (e.g. Terminator and, er, 1984). However, there now seems a new line in films, at least, almost what I'd call 'egging on' or celebrating collapse. The one that caught my eye recently is 'Civil War'. You can read the plot etc. on the wiki here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_War_(film)
Let's just say, Washington gets washed out. Interestingly it's written and directed by an Englishman who started with novels (The Beach - yep, became a film) moved onto films care of zombies (28 Days later) and then his first directorial debut was the A.I. classic movie Ex-Machina in 2014 (does A.I escape to potentially cause havoc? - well...).

The other A I. reality mimics fiction story that also got me facepalming was this one:

'ChatGPT to lose voice over Johansson similarity'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51188y6n6yo

Scarlett Johansson starred as the voice of a 'flirty' A.I. in the film 'Her' from 2013 ! And yep, it got messy in that: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

Has western humanity become so detached and screen-led they see a lot of recent fiction as 'true'? Looks like it!

[ecosophia]

Interesting.

[(Anonymous)]

>'ChatGPT to lose voice over Johansson similarity'

LLM and most of AI including HTR, is getting good results around 80-90% accuracy rates on large sets of training sets.

In corner cases were you actually need intelligence you can get accuracy rate lower than radom choices.

As the worlds keep change faster and faster and we depend on artificial intelligence built on a training set of a world that used to be but is no longer here, what could go wrong.

Another cluelessness enhancer to enhance the PMC stubborness in the denial of realities of physical world limitations, immune systems, demographic realities etc