with what does the book begin?
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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Wait, they're still drinking coffee, and it takes 58 minutes? Jeez, my genai quantum robot does that in 58 seconds and summarizes the gustatory experience into 3 bullet points for me. Get with the times.
Since nobody else has mentioned it:
The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.
This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.
The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.
Truly, "hard SF" means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won't work.
Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes)
This is kind of what I have to give to Niven. The guy is a libertarian, but he would follow his story all the way into such results. And his series where organs are being harvested for minor crimes? It completely flew over my head that he was trying to criticize taxes, and not, say, republican tough-on-crime, mass incarceration, and for profit prisons. Because he followed the logic of the story and it aligned naturally with its real life counterpart, the for profit prison system, even if he wanted to make some sort of completely insane anti tax argument where taxing rich people is like harvesting organs or something.
On the other hand, much better regarded Heinlein, also a libertarian, would write up a moon base that exports organic carbon and where you have to pay for oxygen to convert to CO2. Just because he wanted to make a story inside of which "having to pay for air to breathe" works fine.
The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.
Oh and don't forget the cat people that used to be more aggressive but now they are nicer because of all the long wars in which the aggressive ones killed each other. I liked Ringworld overall, but indeed there is an awful lot of eugenics thinking in there.
pls let me know who thinks Ringworld is ”hard SF” so I can punch them
I've been thinking about this post for a full day now. It's truly bizzare, in a "I'd like to talk to this person and study their brain" kind of way.
Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That's small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:
take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need
I can't even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.
I can't understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there's this moment where you think "god I remember there was this particular chart I saw" or "how many people lived in Tokio again?" or "I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once". In the days of yore you'd write one Google query and you'd get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn't actually take two minutes either, it's like an instant one-second thought of "oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere". You don't read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you're supposed to memorise?
How on earth do you think of "precisely the information you need". What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that's a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don't know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don't you ever read something and go "oh, I never even thought about this", "I didn't know this was a problem", "I wouldn't have thought of this myself". If not then what the fuck are you reading??
I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, "did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view."
This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn't know you didn't know. It's something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don't comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?
I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books
He has Dune on his list of worlds to live in, though...
edit: I know. he fed his post to AI and asked it to list the fictional universes he'd want to live in, and that's how he got Dune. Precisely the information he needed.
I think they consider "being well-read" solely as a flex, not as a means of acquiring actual knowledge and wisdom.
What's more, there's a reason people write books. Information is best conveyed via narrative with context. You can throw all the stats you want at someone, if you don't give them a story to tie them all together it's just noise. That's why we have teachers instead of just textbooks and textbooks instead of just encyclopedias
take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need
I can’t even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.
This part threw me as well. If you can think of it, why read for it? Didn’t make sense and so I stopped looking into this particular abyss until you pointed it out again.
I think the only interpretation of what this person said that approaches some level of rationality on their part is essentially a form of confirmation bias. They aren’t thinking of information that is in the text, they are thinking “I want this text to confirm X for me”, then they prompt and get what they want. LLMs are biased to be people-pleasers and will happily spin whatever hallucinated tokens the user throws at them. That’s my best guess.
That you didn’t think of the above just goes to show the failure of your unfeeble mind’s logic and reason to divine such a truth. Just kidding, sorta, in the sense that you can’t expect to understand an irrational thought process using rationality.
But if it’s not that I’m still thrown.
They aren’t thinking of information that is in the text, they are thinking “I want this text to confirm X for me”, then they prompt and get what they want.
I think it's either that, or they want an answer they could impress other people with (without necessarily understanding it themselves).
Oh, that's a good angle too. Prompt the LLM with "what insights does this book have about B2B sales" or something.
I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain
It may need to be removed for the purpose, but they'll be fine because you can just ask an LLM how to put it back again when you're done.
the end
I think the end is way too generous. I don't think we deserve an end.
Yea, it's not The End, as in humanity dies off, but the end, as in civilization collapses back in to a disgusting dark age and has mass dieoffs.
It wouldn't even be the first time in human history.
LMFAO, Dune? The setring where computers don't exist anymore because mankind doesn't want machines thinking for them? That dune?
E: sorry slight spoilers for old and popular science fiction series. (You'd think they would have picked some more positive but less well known transhumanist science fiction books with nice societies, or pick specifics they liked but nope).
The Foundation is a horrible place to live, it is a frontier city created under false pretenses where you live under constant threat of a crisis, manipulated from afar by the second foundation, while 'Rome' falls apart around them. Billions die.
Hyperion is a horrible place to live, the main hegemonic force is a hypercolonialist empire that destroys all variety, kills the dolphins, is secretly run by AIs who abuse humanity, power everything by destroying the energy that gives us love, and morph into a authoritarian theocracy secretly run by AIs who are now at war with the beings in the love dimension. Also, billions die when the first empire falls.
Ringworld is ... not a book series I remember much from, read it when I was young, might be ok might not be.
Also all these worlds also have a big magical element in it, dune with all the spice stuff, hyperion with the love dimension, foundation with the psi powers and magical prediction powers. And they are setups for the stories conflicts (and well, stories).
It is all a bit like saying you want Singularity skies Festival arrive without reading up on what happens afterwards. Helps if you actually read books not skim through them in 2 hours.
E: I need to make a confession, this guy changed my mind on agentic LLMs. They should use them, it will improve their reading comprehension. (they should also add pronouns, if they don't want to be called they)
The only place I've read about in an SF book where I'd really like to live is the world of Neal Stephen's Anathem, and that's mostly because they keep all the nerds in big nerd communities where they nerd away without being hassled by the outside world.
Brave New World mostly seems to do the same iirc. The main character just rejects going to intellectual island iirc. The Culture, or life as a House of Suns shatterling also doesn't seem bad.
I don't want to live in the world of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
I don't want to live in the world of The Giving Tree.
I don't want to live in the world of Pippi Longstocking (Sweden).
I want to live in the world of Goosebumps, The Yellow Pages, and JBL Tune Beam Quick Start Guide.
Dune
Prompts ChatGPT, skims the output because of muh ‘fishency
The Omelas Hole sure sounds like a paradise, I want to live in there!
See the bright side: chatbots are going to ruin the speedreading industry.
Your bonus points link is even dumber than you're suggesting. The first half of the tweet:
I don't want to live in the world of "Camp Of The Saints".
I don't want to live in the world of "Atlas Shrugged".
I don't want to live in the world of "The GULag Archipelago".
I don't want to live in the world of "Nineteen Eighty-Four".
I don't want to live in the "Brave New World".
I want to live in the world of Hyperion, Ringworld, Foundation, and Dune
I don't want bad things! I want good-ish things!
Also I've never read Ringworld or Hyperion but the other two stories span literal millennia and show wildly different societies over that period. Hell, showcasing that development is the entire first set of Foundation stories. Just... You can absolutely tell this sonofabitch doesn't actually read.
I don't want to live in the "Brave New World".
Kind of funny because while it is dystopian, it is so in a very... calm, ordered and non-threatening kind of way. While Dune is overall just hell. Nothing good about it. Except if you like being addicted. Then there's plenty
It's also kind of weird to see Atlas Shrugged on the list. Not because it's not dystopian because the only thing it's missing from its libertarian hellscape is realistic consequences in the form of bear attacks. But unlike the others the society isn't expressly said to be awful by the narrative. Or, for Scholtzenizen, by reality.
spoilers for a number of works follow
Hyperion - mankind lives in uneasy competition with semi-hostile AIs. Wars between human factions have already killed billions. The Earth is destroyed by a science experiment dropping a black hole into the core. The farcaster (teleportation) network causes ecological disasters on multiple planets.
Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden. The only way to travel interstellar distances are via the monopoly of the Guild navigators. Society is explicitely feudal. Our hero protagonist disrupts this, establishing a theocracy in a war that kills billions. His successor holds humanity in societal stasis for millenia, to induce the Scattering that will preserve it from similar societies in the future. Of course, billions die during this period.
Foundation - humanity collapses into a new Dark Age. Presumably, trillions die.
Ringworld - I read it long ago but it was so 70s I've basically blotted it out. The wiki summary indicates it's not so bad unless you're stranded on the Ringworld itself.
(No spoiler tags because it's just background lore for Dune that's very tangential to the main plot)
Dune - after catastrophic wars between humans and AIs, computers are forbidden.
That's a retcon from the incredibly shit Dune-quel books from like 15 years after the original author had died. The first Dune was written well before computers as we know them would come in vogue, and the Butlerian Jihad was meant to be a sweeping cultural revolution against the stranglehold that automated decision-making had achieved over society, fought not against off-brand terminators but the entrenched elites that monopolized access to the setting's equivalent to AI.
The inciting incident semi-canonically (via the Dune Encyclopedia) I think was some sort of robo-nurse casually euthanizing Serena Butler's newborn baby, because of some algorithmic verdict that keeping it alive didn't square with optimal utilitarian calculus.
tl;dr: The Butlerian Jihad originally seemed to be way more about against-the-walling the altmans and the nadellas and undoing the societal damage done by the proliferation of sfba rationalism, than it was about fighting epic battles against AI controlled mechs.
Asimov being Asimov, the human consequences of the decline and fall of the galactic empire happens mostly of screen.
How exactly Trantor in a couple of hundred years went from a bustling planetary city to a planet where the last survivors scratch out a living from farming the former imperial grounds, is better left unexplored. If you are living in that world you are much more likely to be among the masses were stuff happens that will eventually be noted by Foundation scholars as "population decline", than being a Foundation scholar.
It's been ages since I read Hyperion but I think it's one of those settings that start out somewhat utopian but as the story progresses you are meant to realize they are deeply fucked.
Also I had to look up Camp of the Saints, and I think complaining about living there may be a racist dog whistle.
edit: So apparently it really is a huge racist shibboleth, which makes me wonder if it's common for grok to recommend it and nobody noticed because it's kind of obscure.
"The Camp of the Saints is a 1973 French dystopian fiction novel by author and explorer Jean Raspail. A speculative fictional account, it depicts the destruction of Western civilization through Third World mass immigration to France and the Western world."
More of a train whistle than a dog whistle this one.
No may be about it, Camp of the Saints is only ever mentioned by big racists these days. Might as well be the Turner Diaries.
I live how he put The Gulag Archipelago in there along a bunch of speculative fiction.
The Gulag Archipelago is the dystopian future after (((Those People))) successfully destroy Western civilisation by flooding it with gay Muslims, of course.
spoiler for hyperion
In the first book it is revealed that the utopian hegemonic force is actually hypercolonialist, which destroyed one of the main characters planets (and killed the dolphins) and made him turn to terrorism. The later books make everything worse.
Found a primo response in the replies:
Would be interesting to put him to the test vs someone who had spent two hours reading the book.
He gets 1 prompt and his little agents. He can't keep prompting for every question.
Maybe he didn't read Dune he just had AI summarize it.
We already have AI summarized Dune, it's called WH40k.
I mean even if you somehow miss the whole computers are haram aspect of the duniverse, being a space peasant ruled by psychic tyrants still hardly seems like a winning proposition.
I think I figured it out.
He fed his post to AI and asked it to list the fictional universes he’d want to live in, and that’s how he got Dune. Precisely the information he needed, just as his post describes.
Pretty sure in OPs head they are the psychic tyrant
On a desert planet where giant deadly worms roam, where water is such a scarce resource...
but yeah it doesn't get better after Paul is forced to leave