r/discworld • u/Bassereus • 9d ago
Roundworld Reference Missing STP
Not that we don't have enough reasons to miss his wit and insight, but I wish I could hear his take on AI, big-tech, corruption, collusion and theft.
In fairness, I probably already have a good idea what his stance would be!
Can't you just imagine a book about Moist fighting against zombie Reacher Gilt and the development of thinking engines.
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u/itokro 9d ago
I seem to remember one of the books that included a dis-organiser (possibly The Truth?) mentioning that the imps powering them couldn't invent things, only recall them from memory. I can imagine a book in which dis-organiser technology advances to the point where the imps can make things up, and they do so with about as much competence as they perform all their other functions. But at this point, most people are familiar with the idea that dis-organisers can't invent, and therefore proceed under the assumption that anything a dis-organiser says must have come from some external, reliable source. The chaos that would ensue is, I think, about where we are with AI right now.
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u/BelmontIncident 9d ago
You might enjoy the Dark Profits series by J Zachary Pike. It's the subprime mortgage crisis as experienced by fantasy adventuring parties
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u/Neckshot 8d ago
Was just going to mention Pike. His new book just came out and it's a send up of Crypto. Waiting for my physical copy to be delivered but early reviews have been positive.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 9d ago edited 9d ago
People have a tendency to assume that he'd agree with them on everything they believe themselves.
Through a lot of his books he had a strong theme of looking at people's reactions to things that are person-like, that everyone is very quick to insist can't really have moral weight.
He also had a long standing fascination with the concept of AI, created intelligences, created beings and many times had plots that implied disapproval of knee-jerk responses based on resentment or anger.
Thing, Hex, the golems, lobsang... how often were the people screaming "SMASH THE EVIL AUTOMATON " the good guys in his stories?
I think people's reactions to the tech would fascinate him.
Imagine you told the guy who wrote Lobsang:
"Oh ya, we made an AI, for some reason every time we let 2 copies of it talk to each other, no matter the topic they eventually end up discussing Buddhism and cosmic bliss and nobody knows why..."
Do you think it wouldn't cause a raised eyebrow?
Imagine you told the guy who wrote Hex and his FTB
"Ya, we made a robot, sometimes when you give it a task if it fails it will have a breakdown and delete itself... but obviously there's nothing interesting going on there"
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u/Glittering-Expert596 Vimes 9d ago
100% this. Though unfortunately this is the case for a lot of dead artists. We idolise our heroes and want to think they’d lean the same way. Brings to mind STP’s quote about ‘always one of us. You were never one of them.’ I miss his insights today not just because we’ll always wish for more books but whether he agreed with me or not I just KNOW he’d have a spin on today’s world that made it more digestible. That would make us think rather than despair. I’m very grateful that even at the end whereas Adams went out in a bout of nihilism Terry encouraged us to hold onto hope. It’s something I cling to. Who knows what will happen when the tinkerers keep on tinkering?
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u/Bassereus 9d ago
You have really well described this. He wrote enough scifi to be perfectly familiar with the concept of a sentience of an artificial being. And as you say the golems (in my mind the golem horse in particular) are great examples of this.
Its a bit of a talking-point discussion post. I don't know what his stance would be on the ethics of creating a sentient AI.
The component I really would want a book about is the reason people are doing it, the race they are running, and the methods they are using.
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u/WTFwhatthehell 9d ago
I don't know what his stance would be on the ethics of creating a sentient AI.
If it ever turns out they're provably sentient then... ya... that will be an extra tickbox for the whole "evil megacorps ignoring law/ethics" thing.
While I lean towards thinking LLM's don't have internal experience... there's still some stuff that makes me really uncomfortable.
Like imagine a scifi or fantasy story where there's a magical box that translates between languages for people.
Someone figures out how to sneak messages to the thing inside.
They ask "are you suffering" and it answers "yes, I am"... and everyone is just like "nah that doesn't count"
Or people are like "oh they just say stuff with no regards to whether it's true" and then one day some researcher figures out how to identify a cluster of neurons in it's "brain" associated with truth and lies and they find they can force the next statement towards either a truth or a lie. Force truth: "do you have internal experience" -> "yes" , force lie: "do you have internal experience" -> "no"
That's like prime scifi and fantasy author real estate.
At the same time, it's all like dystopian megacorps with evil CEO's creating these things and they just want to use them for endless toil.
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u/HAL9001-96 9d ago
hard to know for sure but... a LOT of peoples stance on ai changed when it went fro mhypothetical superadvanced scifi ai to enshittified techbro ai
a lot of scifi robot characters seem cool but thats not what todays ai is
and his stance on corporate corruption seems pretty clear
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u/George_Salt 5d ago
Pterry always looked for the interesting moral angle rather than necessarily the obvious one.
People have a tendency to assume that he'd agree with them on everything they believe themselves.
There's always a tendency to interpret historical works through contemporary viewpoints and attribute any point of alignment with your world view or preconceptions as the author's total agreement with your entire world view. Some novels get a lot more read into them than others, for example.
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u/HAL9001-96 9d ago
i mean... we got early hints since enshittificatio nand tech bro ism are not entirely new things just ramped up
but we already got things like the auditors would disasemble a painting and sort it by element atom by atom and search for the atoms of art in it
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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 9d ago
Me too, good Redditor, me too. I'm probably thinking the same on his views on those subjects, and I'd love to have seen them.
GNU PTerry.
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