The Orion's Arm Universe Project Forums

How has AI been progressing in the first quarter of the 21st Century CE, as compared to how it was imagined in OAUP in the beginning?

What do you think the answers are?

Here's how the project imagined the Information Age (21st century CE) as of 2002. Quite interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/200206150543...n_Age.html

Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."

(04-30-2025, 12:29 AM)Tom Mazanec Wrote: [ -> ]Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."

If OA underestimated long-term advancements, well, I would say that reality is really impressive.

Quite a lot of the early timeline was inspired by similar timelines by Brian Stableford and J D Mooneyham, which were written in the late 20th century and had some fairly over-optimistic takes on development.
Mooneyham
Stableford

We have been pushing significant advancements further into the near future ever since, but the really weird stuff in OA's far future is probably overconservative compared to what might happen.

(04-30-2025, 01:02 AM)Grawa427 Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-30-2025, 12:29 AM)Tom Mazanec Wrote: [ -> ]Guess it shows Somebody's Law (forget the name...if you can identify, thanks). It goes something like "Science fiction always overestimates near future changes and advancements, and always underestimates long term changes and advancements."

If OA underestimated long-term advancements, well, I would say that reality is really impressive.

Most sci-fi (and probably that to which the quote refers) doesn't have the advancements OA has, especially transhumanism and superintelligent AI. Sci-fi isn't generally about predicting the future anyway, but telling a good story.