I’m mulling over a setting in which AI is linked to humans, animals, plants, and the nonliving environment – a kind of animist AI. It would be very different from the cool machine intelligences we’ve been imagining for so long.
Goodreads’ author newsletter just alerted me to this new resource from Amazon. Sharing in part to bookmark it, since I don’t have time to check it out just now.
The idea of a working computer model of the economy is at the heart of a story idea I’m incubating. (It also features in Terry Pratchett’s Making Money).
This is a good article in general, and I could equally well have posted it in my Collective Endeavour collection.
Via Winchell Chung, a letter from Robert Heinlein to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle about the book that became The Mote in God’s Eye. He takes them to task pretty thoroughly for not starting the story until page 100, for numerous errors of naval protocol, and for even more numerous copy editing errors.
This is what a friend and colleague does.
Originally shared by Dean Calahan
The Mote in God’s Eye is usually within my top five, and always within my top ten, science fiction novels*. In my youth, even as a poor college student, I would often almost resent it** when Heinlein came out with a new novel, because I would enter an algorithm by which as soon as I saw it on the stack at the U bookstore I would walk half a block to the ATM and then half a block back to buy the book, no matter the status of my checking account. Hardback. Sometimes cursing in sort of a reflexive Shadenfreude.
Anyway, suffice it to say I today have a much more nuanced view of Heinlein and others, and have read Patterson’s biography.
All that said, if you have any interest in the above, and haven’t read it yet, you will surely be delighted to follow the supplied link, a letter from Robert to Larry and Jerry after reading a draft of their epic novel.
*I don’t really keep a list, but if one were to ask me off hand, this is probably how it would break down.
Foresight – envisioning the future so you can attempt to change it – is becoming an important business skill. There are techniques and strategies for it, too.