I’ve been thinking about how and why some topics, periods, and ideas become fertile ground supporting an ecosystem of imaginary worlds, and others do not.
Plausibility and surprise
Will Sasso doesn’t look anything like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Or Steven Seagal. He does kinda look like James Gandolfini. But his impressions of all three actors are equally good. Why?
Science fiction as a lens on scientific progress
Science fiction uses the future as an arena to explore and extrapolate from the problems of the present, with technological change and sociocultural change alternating in the role of dependent and independent variables. A broad overview of the trends in 20th and early 21st century sci-fi (or, more honestly, a quick once-over of the books that came to mind when I thought this up in the shower) suggests that the interplay between these variables in our own time determine the predominant “mood” of that era’s sci-fi.
Generative AI generates Gell-Mann amnesia
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
The price of a bit and the tear tracks of the cheetah
Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier have written a piece proposing an AI dividend. I like the idea, and I’d like to riff on their pricing strategy a bit.