I feel that what’s missing in much of today’s Science Fiction is the sense of Adventure, in many cases subsumed by the technology that’s supposed to support it. Without that adventure, you have a convoluted theorem of science that may or may not be possible. Science Fiction is the Spy Story, the Romance, the Western, given a veneer of hyper-advanced technology or other worlds or dimensions.

Jules Verne might be considered the progenitor of classic science fiction, but fantastical stories have been around for as long as humans have been able to communicate. All you have to do is go back to Roman times, Greek times, even–from what we’ve seen in cave paintings–stone-age times. Science Fiction is Imagination. Let’s not lose sight of that fact.

Keep on keeping on,

Tina Sena

You’re basically describing the overarching theme of most of Grant Morrison’s comics work, specifically The Invisibles, The Filth, and Final Crisis.

I agree that it does neuroscience a disservice to conflate a leg/scooter comparison with a computer/AI comparison. Neuroscientists and AI aficionados aren’t saying “Hey if we make a computer, it might become a brain!” – Hollywood might be saying that, but nobody sane is. Instead, they’re saying “A really accurate theoretical representation of the brain is the same as the brain on some level.”

“We don’t know how the brain works” is only true on the weakest possible level: we’ve just not yet build a very large scale representation of a brain that can emulate more than a few dozen neurons in full detail. “We can’t possibly understand it” is only true as much as “no one person can grok the entirety of code for a modern operating system”. This fact does not prevent us from writing modern operating systems, however. We just make tools to make the task easier, and break the job into discrete chunks. AI is a similar task. We don’t need to know how a subsystem comes to a conclusion: just that it DOES do it. Black boxes, all the way down.

So yes, a mechanical calculator could achieve sentience, if it duplicated enough of the brain’s functionality. Imagine a world in which an AI relies on humans to polish its cams and gears, and runs at a fraction of the speed of a human brain, but many times the breadth. Could be a lovely way of showcasing some of the astonishing analog designs for mechanical integrators, multipliers, and cam magic that genuinely were used back in the pre-silicon days (and nowadays when people think of cams, they can think of nothing more complicated than a car’s camshaft! Mourn for the lost arts!).

Or, extrapolating out further, any perfect representation of the brain. So you could have a vast library that is updated over millennia by scribes, pouring a planet’s resources into finding what the first thought of their vastly intelligent but muddy-slow AI will be. (“Hungry”, perhaps: or “scared”).

Which brings me back on topic. Arguments like this, and extrapolations out from them, are a good way to come up with new worlds.

My favourite way to find new ideas is talking to unusual people Getting out of my comfort zone to talk to people with, say, multiple-personality-disorder (“multis”, as they prefer to be known). And discover that at least some of them consider themselves a gateway to another universe, through whom many members of that universe speak. Easy fodder for a short story, there!

Another is parables. If I’ve a bee in my bonnet about something, and people don’t seem to get it, then I write a little parable about it.

Not that I’mgood enough to ever be published or anything. But to me it looks entirely possible to write a sci-fi story that doesn’t go all “zomg a singularity is required by Moore’s Law”, just like it’s possible to write one without saying “zomg an alienless galaxy is required by the lack of von Neumann probes!”

Hmm, are you disagreeing with the basic principles of scientific reductionism–that the behavior of all complex macro-systems can in principle be derived from the interactions of all the microscopic parts that make them up, with there being some regular mathematical rules governing all the micro-interactions? All of modern science is based on this type of reductionism (which is not synonymous with ‘reductionism’ in the sense of saying you won’t learn anything new or interesting by studying emergent behavior in macro-systems if you already understand the micro-laws), and as long as the basic laws governing the micro-parts can be simulated reasonably well on a sufficiently powerful computer, then in principle any macro-system can be simulated accurately as well, it doesn’t matter whether the system’s internal structure is anything like a computer’s. For example, with a sufficiently powerful computer we could accurately simulate the behavior of arbitrarily large collections of water molecules–see here for a successful simulation of a collection of water molecules using nothing but the laws of quantum physics–despite the fact that we wouldn’t ordinarily say water “is a computer”, and similarly reductionism implies that with sufficient knowledge of the micro-parts of a brain and how they interact, we should be able to create a simulation that behaves just like a real brain, even if we wouldn’t say the brain “is a computer” either.

It takes anywhere between years and millennia to get anywhere, although you don’t age or experience the time because of relativistic time dilation. You can travel to other worlds, but when you come back it’ll be maybe a thousand years later and you’ll find a completely different landscape, culture and language from the one you left. It’d be great for stories that explore the nature of history. There’s no galactic civilisation because of the impossibility of communicating in real-time, though more limited empires arise and fall continuously. Technology can go backwards as well as forwards due to economic and environmental crashes, wars, the depletion of resources, emergence of dictatorships, etc., so although it’s thousands or even millions of years in the future the galaxy (or at least the part of it that’s been reached so far) is filled with planets whose human occupants have anything from a high-tech to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I’d write a novel set in this universe myself, only I’ve never been all that good at making up stories. Perhaps that’ll change one day.

Find the story first. Let the details follow.