Charlie Stross’s keynote at the 34th Chaos Communications Congress Leipzig is entitled “Dude, you broke the Future!” and it’s an excellent, Strossian look at the future we’re barelling towards, best understood by a critical examination of the past we’ve just gone through.
Stross is very interested in what it means that today’s tech billionaires are terrified of being slaughtered by psychotic runaway AIs. Like Ted Chiang and me, Stross thinks that corporations are “slow AIs” that show what happens when we build “machines” designed to optimize for one kind of growth above all moral or ethical considerations, and that these captains of industry are projecting their fears of the businesses they nominally command onto the computers around them.
The talk is an hour long, and really worth watching the whole thing. I especially loved the setup explaining the process of writing believable near term science fiction. Until recently, 90% of everything that would exist in 10 years already did exist, the next 9% you could extrapolate from physical laws, and only really 1% was stuff you couldn’t image. (Stross makes the point that the current ratios are more like 80 / 15 / 5, as evidenced by brexit and related upheavals, which makes his work harder).
It matches well with Clay Shirky’s premise in Here Comes Everyone, that first goal of a formal organization is future existence, even if it’s stated first goal is something else.
It's always more complicated 