Discussion: Ideas for a Lesswrongian anticipation Sci-Fi set in 2060

Well, computers were anticipated in 1671, and

The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life.

The term "cyberspace" itself was coined by William Gibson in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome", though it is indelibly associated with his later novel Neuromancer (quoted above). The setting in this story involves computer networks whose operating system is now a virtual reality simulation of a TRON-like "world in the computer".

Jules Verne didn't anticipate Submarines: there were already quite a few of those back then although none as huge and NERV-Titanic (relative to the era) as the Nautilus.

But, IMHO, the ultimate example is:

Snow Crash is basically the tale of a sword-slinging hacker who teams up with a badass Kourier in a Post Cyber Punk disincorporated USA to fight "Snow Crash" - a computer virus for the brain. Oh, and there's a badass biker with glass knives and a nuclear bomb strapped to his motorbike, too.[...]The book is also notable for its uncanny prediction of future internet trends. While holographic web terminals have not yet come to pass, we do have heavily populated 3D virtual worlds, satellite photograph software, and a massive user-created online library. (Actually, Second Life and Google Earth were inspired by this book.)

So, the ultimate badass achievement for science-fiction writers isn't to just anticipate stuff, it's to have their anticipation cause the changes and inventions in the first place, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, no, I'm not too worried about making stuff up, cuz that stuff might actually end up being made when it otherwise wouldn't be. We're free-roaming in Idea Space, man, let's just enjoy the ride and try to come up with something fun as well as pedagogic. Plus, the fun thing about Less Wrong is that our focus on human biases and systematic errors gives us foot to write plots that aren't all that sensitive to Zeerust, relying on deeply-seated human idiosyncrasies instead. Going that route is also the easiest way to appeal to the mainstream and to get the high-status "Literature" qualifier, which is always good publicity AND it would allow us to slip our Author Tract in a fairly honest and straightforward way without making it a heavy handed filibuster...

Having access to information and actually having assimilated it are two entirely different things. Hainv Wikipedia wired into your brain will allow you to check cursory definitions and article-introductions near instantly, but your interlocutor must wait a couple of minutes for you to read and understand. That time will vary depending on how enhanced your intelligence is and how much you are already acquainted with the topic at hand. It might grow enormously if, say, upon meeting a lesswrongian for the first time, you're forced to make a wiki walk through their archives just to be up-to-date with them (seriously, this habit of peppering articles with links to other articles when they aren't strictly necessary for the understanding of the texts should stop, it creates an unhealthy in-house feeling and forces new users into month-long ermitatges trying to close the exponentially exploding army of tabs!).

Given the fact that History is in constant acceleration and that things are more and more inter-connected, I assume there'd be a state-sponsored effort (if not an entire industry) of developing digest history books and other introductory material, not for Dummies, but for Thawees (we should get a better name than that for the Resurrected... we should also get a derogatory one, because racism and priviledge: "The Walking Dead"? "They're History"? "Time-Skippers"? "Dinosaurs"? (Cue jokes about blood in amber and the prophesized Dinoday),

You really should make a dedicated discussion-level post for this.

I really enjoyed this, very watchable. Subscribed!

Watched the video. Loved it. Except for the bit at the end, the positions were made to look too emotional rather than reasoned. Instead of saying an outraged "going to church makes him moral?" he could have said something along the lines of "you know who else went to church every day? Archbishop Richeleu and Girgori Rasputin. You know what they had in common, besides being high-ranking priests? They shanked a number of women that's in the order of the hundreds" or maybe some shorter but equally strong counterexample in the "him going to church doesn't prove anything" line, including that exact phrasing, especially if they've talked about the topic before.

There's also a serious audio problem, I really had to strain my ears to listen.

Otherwise, as I said, I loved it, especially the implications of "living in the Metaverse".

Hehe, a FGAI could be easily called a literal Deus Ex Machina... The God me made could be in many ways better and more competent than any God we made up XD This phrase is sure to piss off so many people, I think Í'll make it the slogan of the pro FAI group. Although I somewhat optimistically anticipate that by 2060 such a thing wouldn't even be remotely provocative but instead would be smack dab in the middle of the Overton Window and would be about as bold as saying "YES, WE CAN" in 2008...

... I need to read up the Fun Theory sequence before elaborating on how people and the FAI would interact, otherwise I risk getting seriously panned for coming up with messy stuff like this [ITWASABEGINNERSMISTAKEPLEASEDON'TSINKITMORETHANITALREADYISIMBEGGINYA ;_;].

Trying to write hard science fiction for this setting is not remotely possible for any human equivalent mind.

Ghost in the Shell does it pretty well, IMO. Well enough to suspend disbelief, at least.

For one thing, you can't read in a dream, that brain area doesn't work, and all tries of reading by lucid dreamers have resulted in either failure or awakening.... (I know, I have to find the research paper I read that in, cuz links or it didn't happen).

That is not true. I have read in dreams. The idea that you can't do so was perpetuated by a Batman: The Animated Series episode, but it has no basis in fact.

Now do we or do we not have flying cars and jetpacks?

We have those things, but then we don't have them.

If you want to make a story that sounds plausible, try and consider not just "would this technology work?" but "if we could make this, would we use it?" Consider the other things we'd be able to make if we could make that particular technology.

Whoops didn't mean to comment.