Gregory's ServerIain Banks perfectly explained #GenerativeAI twenty years ago.
Everyone should read this passage.
Quotes from "The Algebraist"
 16 comments
@beyondmachines1 Donβt recall this specific passage. Banks Culture books were good preparation for AI. Fan of his books starting in β86 w/used copy of The Wasp Factory, 2nd most read author. @stevewfolds This is towards the final chapters of The Algebraist. A conversation between Seer Fassin Taak and the computer of the Voehn ship. Easy to gloss over in the grand scheme of the story, but so relevant.  @rk @stevewfolds The Algebraist has AIs that rivals the level of snark of Killing Time. @beyondmachines1 @beyondmachines1 Far from enamored with the LLM hype, but this is simply not wrong. Literally reading half the abstract of the ChatGPT paper is enough to get that. @joergr And Iain Banks wrote it more than 20 years ago. The knowledge was already there, but the systems were called "expert systems" and required huge datacenters of compute power to run.  @kithrup @beyondmachines1 Yes, John Searle wrote his paper "Minds, Brains, and Programs" in 1980, though the concepts go back at least as far as Leibniz. I am pretty sure that Banks read Hostadter and Dennett's annotated anthology of essays, papers, and fiction about AI, The Mind's I, which includes a version of Searle's paper.  @beyondmachines1 See also the Finn from @GreatDismal's Sprawl Trilogy. A construct based on Finn asks to be unplugged β interesting as a simulation of what the real Finn would have wanted.  @beyondmachines1 If only modern generative AI were as Eliza-like and didn't require the energy to air condition a small town in order to put a third breast in a celebrity photo.  @beyondmachines1 whoa, hey, don't go spilling all of my "how to appear normal" secrets |
@beyondmachines1 Always ahead of the curve.
Saying that, he ultimately had a much more positive outlook for AI in that novel as the precursors to the Minds than the plagiarising slop-machines we have foisted on us today by a load of fly-by-night grifters.