> allowing the entire fleet to upload terabytes of data for continuous learning and improvement
Ugh.
Edit: Yes, I meant I, Robot the film. U.S. Robotics and the like.
- novel idea or technology
- counterintuitive effect of technology
I think the second is easier written as "what if Good Thing was actually Bad". So that's what you get. The former style is perhaps still available in books like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
But the latter style is much more readily written and consequently has dominated sci fi as more authors enter the field.
The Torment Nexus view is mostly driven by context blindness. "oh my god, they'll scan the mother's blood to perform eugenics if they have sequencing technology and it will be horrible". Well, advanced societies do that a lot: Down's is scanned for using a Maternal Serum Alpha Foetoprotein test. "oh my god, they'll use ultrasounds to find undesirable genetics, torment Nexus" but Nuchal Translucency tests are fairly routine in advanced societies and we're fine with them.
This might appear like a fixation on dystopian literature to others. "omg gattaca this MSAFP". It's just generic technoluddism because almost all near future tech is explored via sci fi in the "what if Good is Bad" genre.
People warned about the dangers of social media (or with modern LLMs + Diffusion Models and scamming) and that's kinda come true, but people also warned about the dangers of IVF and that's just been good. So what happens is that people always warn about the dangers. Humans are loss-averse so they find it easy to do that.
It is unsurprising that every new tech seems like dystopian literature because there's a lot of dystopian literature focused on the near future and we're good at coming up with negative hypotheses. There is no significance in it.