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I was thinking of the “taking our jobs (badly)” aspect, but yeah there were a LOT of cautionary episodes on automation and/or artificial life. I would add Requiem For Methuselah as well (Rayna).

It's like... pal... I write sci-fi because I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the future and how technology affects human civilization. I don't just sit here jerkin it to every new silicon toy that comes rolling down the assembly line.

Even in the sci-fi stories with Good AI, it's a fundamentally different beast supporting a completely different society than the one they're currently trying to dismantle with no better plan in place than just funneling all the money to themselves and fucking off their bunkers/Mars.

"Mrs. Shelley, I don't understand why you, a science fiction writer, would give your story such an unhappy ending."

I got the first one from The Turing Option by Harrison and Wossname, and the second from Stephenson's Diamond Age, but I feel like they're useful terms to define what we specifically mean when we say "AI". These days, Machine Learning might be a separate subcategory

AI is replacing as label all the previous labels that used to read smart or heuristic.

"I don't understand why you, a scifi writer, don't appreciate [the same predictive model we've had since the '70s, now used to steal from creators without compensation or recognition, while pretending it isn't just a giant auto-complete and is so frequently wrong it will kill us all in time]? Why?!"

But think of the potential of how a plucky hero feeds an established villain’s AI bad info so it makes bad decisions. And I’m talking classic AI depictions, like HAL.

It's almost like when people look at Superman and think he'd side with ICE.

Maybe I'm weird like this, but when a notable person in a given field has an opinion in that field that differs from mine, my first thought is "Do they maybe know something I don't?" rather than "Why don't they see this obvious to me thing, are they dumb or something?"

I feel this post on a very deep level.

Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease canwecanwecanwe

Fire up those guillotines...

Dunno, ask the mentat

Did Kirk ever meet an AI he _didn't_ have to wrestle control back from? Landru, M-5, Nomad, Mudd's androids... Ok, he or his crew broke half of them with sex (Vger, Rayna, Andrea...) but still. Wasn't until TNG that computers running things was only SOMETIMES bad. (And include Data in that.)

national divorce

They had a point.

We doing this ?! Hell yeah!

Can't get here soon enough.

Let's-a-go!

Nah. Mostly just fuck iPhones.

It's also like, we've played the tape out already. Even an old pervert like Asimov has thought out where this all leads. Why the hell haven't you assholes?

Which makes no sense, because everybody likes omelettes.

In the Asimov’s future story timeline the positronic brains do indeed solve all the world problems and after that they shut down themselves because they realise they are killing what makes humans human.

Not disputing, but robots are different from disembodied AI that generates non-factual information and obscene deepfakes.

Upon reflection I took “With Folded Hands” to be a critique of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. Williamson’s gilded-cage apocalypse for humanity is what you get if you extrapolate the First Law to its logical extreme.

I like the one where the AI just wants to belong and take care of people (Chaos on Catnet)

Yeah, the Culture always seems fun for an average citizen of the Culture, but God help you if any of those Minds take an interest in you or decide you are uniquely needed for something.

In "Evidence" and "The Evitable Conflict" the 2nd law of robotics forces the robots conspire to place a robot at the head of the world government.

The AI in Optimal does that. By killing off most of humanity and convincing the survivors that a bunch of robots are actual people.

The rest is real problems, but "job taking" I want to argue about: Other than destroying the fun jobs (like art and music), "job taking" is good, actually. Replace the Luddism with socialism.

found out the other day that our 12yo was finishing reading Starter Villain, felt good that we was reading someone knowing his footing in this jerked off times we're living in (plus, cats!)

BUTLERIAN. JIHAD.

"Because you listed about four reasons why *yourself*, O Techbro of No Cluefulness. That's why."

Yeah, you know you don't have to work. You don't have to eat or raise your kids and just let the AI do it right? They don't get it. The odds of this working out right for most of the people is very low.

Also, Skynet. And Hal

they should have at least read Vonnegut in high school... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_...

It is insane of the ai people to demand all of humanity’s thought for free so they can just sell them back to us. It’s stuff like this that they seem unaware will cause their demise.

The fuck stick Sam Altman literally said he wants to control all information and sell it back to us.

Well yeah like technically we could consider Nazism a "revolution," but for that reason anyone smarter than a Nazi has a bit of skepticism about the term "revolutionary"

I recommend Day Zero, by @crobertcargill.bsky.social, as a possible AI future that none of us would want. ☠️

Almost everyone who wants a revolution has a very specific perception of who will fall and who will rise. Revolutions, when they come, are notorious for how they do not follow the plan.

Computer Science prof here. Brother, I’m with you. I wrote a short story about a post-AI-won-world. Small hint. You don’t want to be a human in that world.

Machine learning = awesome Big data tools = cool Generative AI = sh&t You have the correct take on AI.

i'll confess to owning a Roomba that you use an app to control, but that's because if I didn't I would never remember to vacuum

That just prompted me to imagine, “Harlan Ellison, author of ‘I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,’ how can you say you don’t like AI?”

s1e2 Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, s3e9 Smiling Friends, Rick and Morty - it’s all there too if you don’t want to read about it. Torment Nexus is everywhere.

A system trained to prioritize wellbeing would push brains AWAY from AI, from delusion, addiction, OCD, suicide, toward connection with life, conservation of Earth. It would push brains to develop social, interpersonal skills instead of increasing their addiction to relationship with sociopathy.

"Fully automated, gay space communism"[TM] would be an unbelievable improvement on all our current systems of economics (corporate surveillance capitalism, etc.) and government (oligarchy for the most part). 3:OP> This moose would be delighted to live in The Culture (or the Preservation Alliance).

did 70s dystopian movies (let alone decades of sci-fi) teach us nothing? #banAI #banDataCenters #*uckerberg #FBezos

If other people appreciate that your tech is bad for almost everyone but you, anticipate some of its possible consequences, and are unwilling to sell it for you, it does not mean that they are stupid, but maybe that they're used to playing in the world at a level other than "can I play, Daddy"?

One of the pile of video game projects I'll probably never finish has you playing a state of the art ai spaceship brain, the first model with full human intelligence. If course since you weigh 8 tons, there's very little room for crew or cargo.

Ah yes, science fiction, a creative genre known for its uncritical enthusiasm towards technological changes of all kinds! Nope, definitely no problems with technology in sci fi. 😗

I wonder what the HAL 9000 would make of this?

Okay, but ACTUALLY, though. 😂 How many sci-fi books taught us about the AI take over? At least HAL wasn’t cranking out fake images and clickbait books.

You mean to tell me Skynet is the bad guy?

A neo-Nazi tech billionaire recently posted that he identifies with “the resistance” in works of fiction such as V for Vendetta (a story about a queer anarchist anti-fascist fighting a white supremacist regime that relies on a supercomputer to govern.)

EXACTLY. People were *not* correctly processing the morals of the stories.

This happened with Michael Lewis's "Liar's Poker" and Oliver Stone's "Wall Street". They thought they were writing exposes and cautionary tales and were horrified when young people would approach them and ask how they could become Gordon Gecko or at least get a job trading bonds.

Keep the "fiction" in Science Fiction...fiction. They aren't guide books they're warning signals.

What if the AI had the personality of our dead best friend?

No, it's because you're a *bad* science fiction writer.

Like we’d believe his denials

Sci-fi that takes straightforward positions for or against something isn’t really worth reading. At that point, it’s just polemic.

First of all, a large language model isn't an AI by the metrics of science fiction. It's just an advanced plagiarism machine.

Yeahhhh those people clearly haven’t read The Ghost Brigades.

'You're a horror fan but don't actually like people being violently killed? Huh...'

You really would think these assholes had not seen a single Terminator movie. Real sci fi buffs ain’t stupid!

People just don't get that a lot of sci-fi is meant to be an exaggeration of problems in society, not a model. Spaceships and robots are added, but it's our fears made manifest. This fear of thinking machines was the backstory in Dune and even 1984 talks of machine-made fiction! So yeh, fuck AI!

I feel like there’s been a thousand years of art suggesting that trying to “play god” turns out poorly.

The AI in books can be charming, interesting, menacing, or any other quality, because getting them to be true artificial general intelligences is easy; you write them as such. The bullshit we have here and now, peddled by the worst among us for no other reason than money, is not so easy.

The same with "Lord of the Rings": A story about different races banding together to fight authoritarians who are threatening peaceful agrarian societies, wrecking the environment with industrial pollution, and using misinformation to create despair is embraced by Sauron and Saruman wannabes.

"I can't understand why the author of 'Don't Invent the Torment Nexus' is not enthusiastic to get into the Torment Nexus we built based on his story!"

Being required yo use it for software dev, and the conversations ive heard management having, ive realized that the driving goal is “i find X boring or hard, therefore everyone does and this is a problem to be solved” Writing, coding, math. Even the ai companies its “making money”

And what AI? I don't see AI anywhere.

You're a scifi writer, why aren't you excited about the torment nexus becoming real???

As a computer scientist, it is precisely my training in the field that causes me to reject the chatbots.

What next, do they expect murder mystery writers to go out & kill people, or ask why those that write with historical settings do so without the intention of time machines?

because it's an artificial thieving tool of fascism designed to destroy writers and other people who create and think?

If they're built by the likes of Trek's Federation, their main purpose *won't* be inducing obedient fear and terror. More likely, joyous research and exploration. That big dish will be a sensor/deflector array to make sure of no more Chicxulub-type disasters!

“You’re a molecular biologist, isn’t it great that laypeople who’d never heard of “mRNA” until a few years ago talk about it all the time now??”

Reminds me of when Asimov was interviewed about UFOs and alien visitations, by media expecting him to insist that we're constantly being visited by aliens, because he wrote fiction about that.

It’s been great ticking off every cautionary tale that sci-fi films and books have warned about during my lifetime one by one

Also that new employee doesn't learn from his own mistakes and sometimes completely ignore basic instrucitons (as in "don't delete the production environment and it's backup")

they don't even remember the M-5! /cries

My world view was formed by sci fi. I can see the various futures!!

Clearly, that person and I are reading *different* sci fi 😬

Obeying an unethical order does not count as "doing nothing wrong". I think what you're reaching for is, "HAL didn't randomly go haywire, but was acting on the instructions of human programmers."

They're hiding over $1T, so yeah. fortune.com/2026/07/31/a...

I've been wondering, did any SF authors predict that our AI overlords would turn out to be quite so shitty: industrial-scale plagiarisers and BS generators?

The kicker is that we're gonna find out that these billionaires have been storing data sets uncorrupted by AI behind our backs. And when the enshittification is complete they'll try and sell those back to us as well.

60-70% of Sci-Fi is like, warning about dangerous tech and dystopian futures.

I don’t understand why you, a fantasy writer, don’t appreciate fire-breathing dragons.

So say we all.