Comment by thwarted
5 hours ago
I never thought about this before, but you made me realize that Sense/Net sure had a lot of employees considering the in-story world had true AGI, enough employees that the Panther Moderns exploited to cause chaos during the Dixie Flatline run. Or was it that the Turing Police were in the habit of shutting down really smart AI resulting in an aggressive need for white collar workers?
On aesthetics, the way the Hosaka is described is as the experience of touching and using it. The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use. In stories, they don't show people having driver problems, or their microphone not working, or having to go to the bathroom (unless it's integral to the plot), which in some sense is similar to talking about lickable/fluid UI widgets and how material design is great and not mentioning that Hosaka moved the setting dialog again, you have to update drivers before jacking in, the sliver of "microsoft" inserted behind your ear makes you watch an ad before giving you access to live prices of antique art, or cyberspace now has a ribbon instead of a toolbar.
The AIs are supposed to be very expensive, but it's left to the reader to figure out why—maybe it wouldn't work out that way in real life, but if the reader can't explore every part of the economic and technological space of the world (they can't), they become immersed within it, and allow the subconscious to come up with reasons for why such technologies exist in the story.
What's interesting in sci-fi at the time is that, because software wasn't fully solidified as a concept (nowhere near, in the case of Neuromancer) everything acts like a tool. What you buy stays just as it is, until it becomes obsolete. There's something quite appealing in that completeness. As you say, software is jarring in a way firmware isn't, and it lets developers be lazy.
As for toilets:
> Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the loft. - Neuromancer
> The reader doesn't actually know what the aesthetics are, nor does the reader get a taste of what it's like to actually use.
And this is how it should be. Johnny Mnemonic's 320GBs became the reality in mid 90' and mundane by 2005.
Agreed. My point is that there's the perception of the characters and corporations as having some meaningful/cool aesthetics in these stories and in the genre, but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how they are different than what we have today. And that's part of what makes good stories timeless.
320GB progressed from amazing, to reality, to mundane, to trivial today, but it would take on different meaning if there was some breakthrough real-life research that indicated the human brain is, in total, say, only 325GB. Which is what Johnny Mnemonic is really about, even if the numbers and units used are dated.
> you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are
Rollerblading in motorcycle gear; duh.
> but you'd be hard-pressed to identify what they are or how
Oh, that's easy! They are cool!
NB in ~50 years cool would change it meaning and things would be no longer cool for a contemporary reader but some other word designating an awesomeness and delight.
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