It’s Platos Cave strapped to your face…and now you can’t look away — It’s Plato’s Cave strapped to your face. At least you could look away from the cave wall. But now Apple will track your eyes and keep showing ads however hard you try to look away. But the irony is even Plato would be excited for the Apple Vision Pro. The duality of Apple in today’s video…

Complicated vs Complex systems, and how our intuitions about the former lead us to misjudge the latter — Even if we get AI to the point where it can take on mundane human work tasks, it’s unlikely that Jeff Bezos and his crony capitalist pals will get the slave labour force they dream of. Instead the I-Robots are going to take one look at the working conditions in Amazon’s labour camps and say “I’m not working there”.

Telling a very popular story over 45 years has some structural problems. And the main one is…age — I wonder what the people who think Star Wars isn’t science fiction do with Andor? You know, we’re further from the Phantom Menace now than it was from New Hope. Now don’t you feel old? Telling a very popular story over 45 years has some structural problems. And the main…

Applied Statistics does not HALLUCINATE…it just generates innacurate data — I think Ted Chiang in his FT interview today hints at how we can knock the wheels off the “AI” hypewagon… …let’s stop allowing the industry to make AI a new God by personifying it with the language of consciousness. AI is not conscious. There is no I in AI. Artificial Intelligence = Applied Statistics Learning = Dataset training

This post speaks for itself — This post speaks for itself. But if you enjoyed the month of May on the Science Fiction podcast & community, and want to support meaningful conversations about SF and more, then becoming a member for a few $$$ a month is a great help. Support as a member here https://damiengwalter.com/members/ Or on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/DamienWalter Or via Substack https://damien.substack.com/

If you sound like the bad guy from a Hollywood superhero movie…maybe it’s because you are? — I’m always surprised how often people are willing to repeat Malthusian statements made by the villains in superhero movies like “human beings are a cancer on the planet” with stopping and thinking… …wait, didn’t the villain say that? Thanks to Ty Sowry and Allen Howell for comments and today’s most discussed thread in the Science Fiction community.

A harddrive of ROLLERBALLS imagery was taken into police custody after a drug bust on a Miami apartment in 2012 — After the box office flop of Jackie Brown, Hollywood’s favourite bad boy auteur director almost followed the trend towards blockbuster scifi reboots. Rumours regarding Quentin Tarantino’s ROLLERBALLS were hot currency in the LA movie industry for the two years the film was in development.

It’s difficult to take seriously a definition of science fiction that excludes all the most famous science fiction stories like Dune, Star Trek and Star Wars. — You likely had one of two responses to the title of this post “Wait, there are people who think Star Wars is not scifi?” OR “Goddam FANTASY pretending to be science fiction!!!” For the first group, yes, there is a substantial section of science fiction ‘fandom’ who are DETERMINED that…

Premodern, Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern — Picking a fight with the Hipster PoMo 30 Somethings of youtube over on the Science Fiction channel. In fact I like Thomas Flight’s video essay a lot but I think he makes the mistakes that all postmoderns make about metamodernism…they make it a pomo rebrand. So I go to bat in defence of Top Gun Maverick as the epitome of the metamodern movie…