Science fiction hasn’t prepared us to imagine machine learning
One problem in written science fiction is the requirement for it to be at least vaguely commercially viable, which necessitates dramatic plotting and&#x2F;or readability. ML is, to most non-technical people, <i>intensely boring</i>. How do you dramatize it?<p>I&#x27;ve published two novels that go there: 2011&#x27;s &quot;Rule 34&quot;, and -- coming out this September -- &quot;Invisible Sun&quot;, and in both books ML is very much a subaltern aspect of the narrative. That is, neither book would have a plot <i>without</i> the presence of ML, but it&#x27;s not really possible in my opinion to write a novel <i>about</i> ML in the same way that the earlier brain-in-a-box model of AI could form the key conceit of books like &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot;, &quot;The Adolescence of P-1&quot;, or &quot;Colossus&quot; (examples from the 1960s and 1970s when it was still a fresh, new trope rather than being pounded into the dirt).<p>So it probably shouldn&#x27;t surprise anyone much that SF hasn&#x27;t said much about the field so far, any more than it had much to say about personal computers before 1980 or about the internet before 1990 -- what examples there are were notable exceptions, recognized after the event.