I got away from work over the weekend with some cheap science fiction.
I prefer utopian science fiction to the dystopian kind that’s so popular now. The difference lies in their stories, not their tech. It’s all about computing these days.
The book I read was set in a fictional near future and featured an impossible heroine. But what intrigued me most was that in this imagined world everyone had their own AI. An unspecified device hung on the user’s belt, connected through a voice interface and heads-up display. It ran at WiFi speeds, downloading and summarizing enormous documents on command.
Some of its capabilities would be found objectionable, even creepy. It could interface with law enforcement, sending the location of a crime victim and a real-time view of the crime taking place. The video file would be saved automatically, then used by police to both identify the criminal and convict them in court. In the book no one saw this as a problem.
What the AI couldn’t be was creative. It didn’t ask questions and it didn’t pretend to go beyond its data to draw conclusions. It could summarize but couldn’t analyze. In other words it was an assistant, not a master, and not a replacement.
Universities still exist in this world. Research was still done. That’s because the AI didn’t have hands or any other direct interfaces with the physical world.
We’re seeing elements of this today. I have a new camera that can record my bike rides as I take them, both video and audio. Meta glasses provide a heads-up display. Spoken interfaces are now common. My Fitbit can access my e-mail, let me respond verbally to text messages, and give me a two-hour view of my heart rate.
How Fiction Becomes Real
The pieces are in place, in other words, to replace the iPhone’s touchscreen interface, but AI is an augmentation, an application, not a replacement.
Mike Godwin recently showed a version of this chart, showing elements of our march toward “Agentic AI.” It’s like dozens of similar charts I’ve seen over the decades, setting out a roadmap toward which its author believes “their” tech is the ultimate end.
What I have learned is there is no ultimate end. Eventually, all the elements to the left of the chart are absorbed on the way to the right, which doesn’t become real until it’s standardized and affordable.
This is important if you’re in your 20s or 30s. When you’re in your 70s someone will be doing charts like this, where all you ever worked on is in a little circle to the left-hand side of a chart, while the right-hand side looks to an enormous, idyllic future.
Where these ideas start, however, is in fiction. We make stuff up. Some things turn out to be dead ends, because what’s real is only based on what we’re doing now. The futures of the early 20th century were intensely mechanical. Then they became space-oriented, and now they’re computational. They will change again.
In fiction a heroine can do 12 impossible things before breakfast, creating a newer world around technology that doesn’t exist and probably can’t exist. But this is where the future is going to come from, rather than from think tanks, market research or charts like this.
In a fictional future, the future is fiction. Keep learning, keep dreaming, and build better.
