SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
March: We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse #1) by Dennis Taylor
Discuss The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein in the comments below.
Fiasco was translated into English in 1988 by Michael Kandel:
Fiasco (Polish: Fiasko) is a science fiction novel by Polish author Stanisław Lem, first published in a German translation in 1986. The book, published in Poland the following year, is a further elaboration of Lem's skepticism: in Lem's opinion, the difficulty in communication with alien civilizations is cultural disparity rather than spatial distance. The failure to communicate with an alien civilization is the main theme of the book.
Previously: Announcement post • Mars, Ho! • Foundation • The Three-Body Problem • Snow Crash
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
SoylentNews Book Club - Discuss: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Start Reading: Fiasco
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 75 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday February 13 2019, @10:49AM (3 children)
Doesn't work that way, does it? But considering what was known *then* about AI, sufficiently complex computers coming alive was a quite reasonable extrapolation.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday February 13 2019, @11:31AM
The human genetic code will fit on a CD. Somewhere in there is the instructions to build an AI.
It may require later environmental information inputs and a lot of intellectual interaction, but the basic construction instructions are in there. Less than 700MB.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by HiThere on Wednesday February 13 2019, @05:37PM (1 child)
No. No. No.
It was NEVER a reasonable assumption. It was merely an assumption necessary for the story to work, which is a very different thing.
If you want a more reasonable scenario that was fictional, look at "A Logic Named Joe". It was written by Murray Leinster in 1946. It still wouldn't work, but it was, at the time, a (more) reasonable scenario, and is still much more reasonable than "Adan Selene" (AKA "Mike"). It also contains a proto-Internet.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday February 13 2019, @11:28PM
And by the way, I read A Logic Named Joe many years ago (and more recently two or three years ago) and as I recall, it wasn't all that different from Heinlein's Mycroft.
IIRC, in both scenarios, they kept piling on more and more hardware, applications, data processing and external input/stimuli. In the case of the Leinster story there was more direct interaction with humans as I recall.
Maybe I'll go back and read it again.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr