> Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? One thing only, the barren decisions concerning what orders to give the robot next!
-- Galley Slave, a short story by Isaac Asimov, 1942
"What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune
“Where?”
“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.
https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...
https://youtu.be/KOiDWGs4JE4?t=28s
wHNston
Seems like he also predicted internet brain damage...
It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consumption.
Every damaging invention in isolation isn't a big deal. The big deal is setting precedent and the accumulation.
> not puerile consumption.
I agree, it's more akin to seeing how much sawdust one can put in a rice crispy before someone notices. No one wants to eat sawdust, nor is there a mindless desire to.
Edit: and atlas shrugged, but that doesn’t go over well here.
---
1984: control through fear and pain.
Brave New World: control through pleasure and distraction.
Animal Farm: control through corruption and deception.
Atlas Shrugged: control though guilt and regulation.
---
Brave New World is the most prophetic.
Atlas Shrugged has horrific writing, separate from what I feel about the politics.
Following the tangent: I read the book "blind", when I was mind-numbling bored for a couple pre-dialup weeks at a relative's house. Eventually I decided to finish it purely out of spite so that I could confidently denounce it as trash in the future. (And today it pays off?)
In short, it's a book of incredible hypocrisy which also disrespects the reader's intelligence and time.
Hypocrisy, because Rand asserts that certain appeals to emotion or outcome are evil tools of fictional villains, while simultaneously doing the exact same thing in the real world to the audience. The difference is that instead of "think of the starving children", it's "think of the Marty Stu [0] corporate executive üermenschen", the characters the author has been playing up for a couple hundred pages already.
This is compounded by the manifesto chapter where Marty Stu does nothing but monologue. The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought, a kind of necessary deceit to get people ready to swallow a pompous diatribe without looking at it too closely.
You would be correct if that were the whole truth about Atlas Shrugged: defending protagonists on emotional grounds.
But it’s not the whole truth. The very monologue that you dismiss is the tool that provides the emotion with the principle. You know the characters’ reasons for holding their emotions.
Ayn Rand never said that one shouldn’t feel or express one’s emotions. On the contrary, “. . . emotions are not his enemies, they are his means of enjoying life” [1].
In fact, every emotional appeal used in the novel is supported by argument, sooner or later. You cannot say, for example, that the dismissal of James Taggart or Robert Stadler is purely emotional.
> The jarring transition reveals how the story was really just an afterthought
Your claim would be valid if the jarring transition were not Galt’s speech but some other nonfiction. The case is the opposite: the story and speech are very much integral.
The pause of events as such is a neutral tool, with precedents (The Battle of Waterloo in Les Miserables).
A pretty good study of different flavors when taken together, though?
Cast as such it seems rather more prophetic than Soma, IMO.
I mean this sincerely, I don’t understand the beef with shrugged. The idea of “a small population owns the world” not only made sense as a theme, but it what is happening in the world today. I must be too stupid to have realized the political bits.
Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to?
A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came up; only nothing came up among them, because they shared the same philosophy. . . . But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. . . . No one can guard rights, except a government under objective laws. . . . Rational men are not afraid of government. In a proper society, a rational man doesn’t have to know the government exists, because the laws are clear and he never breaks them. [FHF 72]
I do agree that a private estate cannot exist in a society without government. But it is private estate in the sense that the members recognize it as such, and that it can exist in this very narrow context.
1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes.
Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray.
Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society? How we'd be better off if we just ceded total control of our society to the oligarchy?
Yeah... One of these doesn't belong on the list. I read all four, and while I enjoyed the first three, the last one is closer to fanfiction than literature in my mind. I always think of AnCap memes and chuckle to myself when I see it mentioned.