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commonnotions.orgWhy We Fear AI: On the Interpretation of Nightmares — Common Notions PressIndustry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fear

You might enjoy your book, where we ask a similar question, but the other way around: Why do scifi stories about AI resonate with people as narratives about actually existing machine learning (and what does that have to do with the political economy of the whole thing)?

technollama.co.ukWhy does AI in science fiction so often miss the mark?A few days ago there was an interesting post by Andrew Curran that got a lot of responses which was discussing why AI in science fiction often does not have the capabilities that AI already has in reality. I thoroughly agree with that take, but I think that there is much more going on in why AI in science fiction often feels wrong, and I think that it has to do with the reasons why we have artificial intelligence in media in the first place.

I was inspired to try to answer the question posed in this post's title (even if that title was meant to be rhetorical). 2/ bsky.app/profile/tech...

Andres Guadamuz@technollama.bsky.social

Why does AI in science fiction so often miss the mark? A few days ago there was an interesting post by Andrew Curran that got a lot of responses which was discussing why AI in science fiction often does not have the capabilities that AI already has in reality. I thoroughly agree with that take,…

Short answer is that storytellers care about story. Story, story, story. This is especially true in movies and TV. Story drives everything, not accuracy. And we care about stories about people. So AI characters are modified people; just like other movies have talking animals, talking cars, etc. 3/

One case where movies/TV have "gotten it right:" where humans have personal relationships with AI, but you don't need to interpret the AI as conscious. I enjoyed "Her" without believing that Samantha was conscious, and now it seems prescient. Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" as well. 4/

This suggests a fun exercise: watch fictional sympathetic robots, but imagine them as mere chatbots: Data providing simulated relationships to humans; C-3PO + R2-D2’s bickering as generative performances of personality; WALL-E mindlessly following its programmed behaviors long after humans left. 5/

tOad

@toadscroak.bsky.social