AI fiction

Science fiction stories are a lot more important than Serious People will admit. Most of us are at some level aiming towards or away from things we read as teenagers. Here are a few stories that live in my head as we’re watching the birth of AI:

Excession, Iain M. Banks (1996)

What does a good post-AI future look like? By far the most common answer people give is The Culture by Iain M Banks. AIs make the big calls, humanity is in some senses disempowered, but life still manages to be pretty great. 

Excession was my favourite of the series, though day-to-day Culture life is explored more in The Player of Games and Look to Windward.

The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi (2010)

For something that really leans into how radical and disorienting an AI-native world might be, the Quantum Thief trilogy is hard to beat. There is a lot in these books, but one of the deepest themes is the dynamics you get from copyable vs non-copyable minds. “Copy clans” don’t face the principal-agent problems that shape so much about human organizations. Some version of this idea will likely be important even in the near term (Dwarkesh has some thoughs on that here).

Jokester, Isaac Asimov (1956)

Humanity has built a gigantic computer at vast expense. The model requires so much compute that we can only afford to ask a few questions at a time. Grandmaster prompters are nominated to get the most value for humanity. When one Grandmaster starts to ask a series of inane questions, is he wasting humanity’s most valuable resource, or is genius aiming at a target no one else can see?

I first read Jokester many years ago in the PC era, and it seemed hopelessly out of date. Now it sounds like a pretty good description of the near future!

A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge (1992)

Vernor Vinge is the OG of Singularity sci-fi, and I love his books, but it’s hard to point to a specific story that wraps up his worldview. He considered the Singularity a point beyond prediction, writing about it directly was impossible. His books are set around the edges, you mostly observe the Singularity only in the distance. The opening sequence of A Fire Upon the Deep is maybe an exception, describing the birth of a malevolent superintelligence.

Getting to Know You, David Marusek (2007)

Pulling back to the nearer future, David Marusek’s short story collection deserves to be better known. Despite being 20 years old, it’s in some ways the closest thing I’ve come across to a near-future extrapolation of our current tech stack. It explores agents, personal cabinets, proxies, AI personhood, and human social reactions to all of the above.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, Roger Williams (1994)

I hadn’t heard of this one until I came across it recently on Andrej Karpathy‘s book list. It’s a self-published novella, only about 150 pages. It first circulated on the internet as a PDF, though now you can get it print-on-demand from Amazon.

Prime Intellect is a kind of benevolent paperclip maximizer, a Three Laws of Robotics story about the Singularity. It covers similar ground to Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia, or Greg Egan’s Permutation City, though it’s shorter and punchier, and I think lands its points more viscerally than either of them. Definitely recommend, though note that the story contains some of the most graphic descriptions of torture and sexual violence I’ve ever encountered in print. 

Axiomatic, Greg Egan (1995)

Speaking of Greg Egan… At least one of his books definitely belongs on this list. A lot of people recommend Permutation City or Diaspora. They have some classic scenes that live in a lot of people’s heads (e.g. Peer carving table legs). Personally, though, I think Egan’s short stories are infinitely better than his novels. Axiomatic is an incredibly concentrated taste of digital humanity. Stories like A Kidnapping and Learning to Be Me are the kind of thing that can change your whole view of the world in a few pages.

The Whispering Earring, Scott Alexander (2012)

Another cautionary tale, only 800 words long. Originally a LiveJournal post, it would be gone from the world had the Internet Archive not saved it. But you can still read it, and you should.

Slow Music, James Tiptree Jr. (1980)

Myths can contain more truth than history. Let go of the surface detail, swim in the deep currents, how does it make you feel? James Tiptree does this better than anyone, and Slow Music is her take on the singularity. Caoilte is tossing his burning hair…

The Great Silence, Ted Chiang (2015)

Chiang is my favourite SF author, he had to be on this list somewhere :-). The Great Silence is a story about SETI, but it could just as easily be about AI.

He has some more AI-focused stories that are worth a look (The Lifecycle of Software Objects, The Evolution of Human Science), but this little gem feels like a good place to finish.

Bonus mentions

Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
One of the first true Singularity novels, it was a delight at the time, though I think it hasn’t aged as well as some of the other stories above.

The Algorithms for Love, Ken Liu (2004)
A beautiful and bitter little tale, it makes very uncomfortable reading as a new parent.

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Looking back, there are a lot more dystopias on this list than utopias. I think a lot of this is narrative necessity: utopia is boring to write about. Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels stand out as a future that might actually be fun to live in. A challenge for any authors reading!