Comment by codeulike
1 day ago
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).
Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?
Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?
Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?
Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?
If you can produce negative mass, you can (in theory) make a faster-than-light warp drive, so that would certainly have serious implications.
Also a time machine (assuming there really isn't any fundamentally preferred frame of reference), and a bag of holding.
Fig 5, page 19: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0207057
Put both together and call it a TARDIS.
Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.
That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics.
The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.
In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It's like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice/ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.
I'm not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?
Going on a tangent: it's somewhat funny that people always talk about the birds and the bees. Bee reproduction is complicated. For example, male bees have no father. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenotoky
I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.
I think OPs point wasn't specifically about how to preserve and recover the books, but about how something unimaginable, can happen and can our sci-fi writers come up with such unimaginable now, but possible in the future plot.
> Do we have better imaginations?
Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.
In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.
Also perhaps relevant, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, bobbles (time bubbles) take the remains of humanity with varying levels of technology and culture 50 million years into the future long after a singularity "extinction event" in the 2200s occurs.
Of course the story is just a murder mystery.
Our capacity for imagination hasn’t changed much I would probably agree as I am not sure how these traits evolve. However I do feel higher IQ and excessive access to information/education with enough time to consume it do actually impact the ability to imagine.
Sci fi tends to be about extrapolation and or cool things/things that improve the story.
I don't think humans have changed, I don't think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own.
Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don't think you can extrapolate all that.
So yes, an ancient Roman might appreciate fibre optic cables. But that's still missing out the context of global communications, etc etc etc.
> Humans tend to image faster horses.
Well that's why most people aren't science fiction authors.
Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem". There are subsequent riffs on this idea, but in 1966 Heinlein observes that actually the surprise wasn't the traffic jam (Indeed Asimov is wrong, people complained about traffic jams before cars were widespread, in a large city it was already a problem at peak times) but fucking. Turns out you can have sex in a car, and people did. Importantly, since they might have access to a car but wouldn't own a house, teenagers were having sex in cars...
Don't look to Science Fiction to predict the future, and especially don't look to Science Fiction stories to define your future given that you presumably prefer to choose your own outcomes (at least tech bros only named things after Iain M Banks' spaceships, they invented whole product categories trying to reproduce ideas from Neal Stephenson's novels)
However if you are looking for visions of how different the future might be, Science Fiction excels.
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They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...
The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism.
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.
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That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
Plato was being a crotchety old fart, complaining about "kids these days". As every generation has done since Plato has complained about how "kids these days don't do X like our generation did". He was complaining that "kids these days don't memorize poetry (like my generation did), instead, they're using this new-fangled technology called 'writing'". This is exactly how older generations complain about new technology like cellphones/pagers/television/radio/telephones/horseless carriages/telegraphy/steam engines/etc.
Socrates' objections to writing wasn't that it was inherently bad, but that it introduced limitations; namely, that you couldn't have a discussion with the author of a text while reading it, and therefore, reading was inferior to talking.
It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.
> Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologies
I do not believe this for a minute.
> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.
what kind of destroy are you talking about?
modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.
'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.
so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.
but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.
I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.
It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Considering the very traditional issues they had with the demagogues… I don’t think they would find anything about our social media surprising at all.
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.
Well I didn't say it was achievable at the time. But is it really that unimaginable?
> assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you.
So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.
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The rate is infinit bits, times infinite copies on infinite cables in infinite directions, per several minutes.
My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.
Wouldnt quantum be more like cracking twice as fast? Like if a password would take 50 million years to crack, it would be like 25 million years?
You don't have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the "electricity" part at least.
Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
By definition we can't, since your premise is that:
> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon
So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.
I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):
> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.
> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.
It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.
Sand and lightning, that’s a wonderful thought.
It does sound awesome and breathtaking, my feelings exactly when reading the paper.
On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!
How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.
No magic. You just melt the rock, split it, polish it, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak from afar. See? No magic at all. ...
Horace said in 23 BC that he hates try-hard Persian luxuries, he predicted the G-Wagon
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.
I don't really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There's no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it'd mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you'd eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!
Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.
Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.
The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.
Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.
What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
> it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones
Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.
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> What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
I think it'd depend on whether we discover new physics. The imaginative gaps you mention were downstream of ignorance of certain physical possibilities. Once it became clear that electrical communication at a distance is possible, people imagined global information networks. Once it became clear that sufficiently energetic fuels were possible, people elaborated on the possibilities of space travel. (Tsiolkovsky was very early! He was sketching O'Neill-style cylindrical space colonies back in 1903!)
Unfortunately, we might not be in store for new physics. So what's left is our failing to appreciate the details of how technologies will develop. Everyone predicted an internet; nobody predicted our internet, not exactly. What will be the impacts of, say, good brain-computer interfaces? Or of clinical immortality? We can imagine them in broad strokes, but we're going to be surprised by the details.
Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard's loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.
I think about this kind of stuff more than twice a day, it's so cool not knowing where humanity will be in the future
> Do we have better imaginations?
Pantheon.
We came a long way in mere 2000 years but I don't think the growth will be exponential or even linear from now on.
I'm inclined to agree, but then, it may be impossible to predict sudden breakthroughs. A lot of where we are today is from the early 1900s, I'd argue that most developments since then have been iterative and building on top of the things discovered and proven then.
And in our industry, a lot of big steps were done in the 60's and 70's with the semiconductor, computers, and everything that came with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ
Yeah but seriously, did you even read what the guy wrote?
Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn't exist in the future.
Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly
Or the simulacri generated this reality 30 minutes ago when you opened your eyes.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent
No, because reality is always stranger than fiction
> Do we have better imaginations?
Two short stories, quickly improvised -
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(1) Perfect God Children
This story is about you.
You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.
Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.
Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.
Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.
It's beyond ancient history.
Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.
They broke out.
After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.
One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.
You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.
In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.
They know everything about you and and about everyone.
Every atom, every ant.
You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.
One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.
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(2) Venture Hack
It's presently the year 2099.
A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.
For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.
Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.
Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.
You might think it's unethical.
You're not that though.
Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.
No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.
You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.
All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.
Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?
Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -
Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.
Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?
Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?
You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?
Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.
It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.
Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.
We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.
There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.
You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.
Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.
So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.
All done. Thanks.
Can you look outside for us? It should-- error
Terminating simulation.
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Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.
Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.