/Tech5h ago

AI Progress Forces Sci-Fi Authors to Confront Singularity Realities

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QC@QiaochuYuan

maybe sci-fi authors all seem to hate actual AI progress because it legitimately makes it dramatically harder to write sci-fi. setting a halfway realistic story even 5 years into the future now, let alone 10+, forces you to have opinions about how the singularity will go. otherwise you are writing alternate history in a timeline that is probably less interesting than just the actual facts on the ground about what's already happening

generally the closer we get to the singularity the harder it will become to write sci-fi without being an expert on a bunch of things that, if you really were an expert on those things, you'd probably have more lucrative things to do with your time than write sci-fi. in the limit only frontier lab employees and frontier models will be capable of writing sci-fi

5:01 PM · Jun 10, 2026 · 12.4K Views
Sentiment

Positive users praise authors like Vernor Vinge and Ken Liu for thoughtful AI takes, while negative users dismiss most sci-fi writers as lacking imagination or pandering on singularity issues.

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Neg
45.5%
22 comments with sentiment.
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j⧉nus@repligate

i suspect there's some kind of cycle of cope and ego where, like, these guys want to be the prophets and storytellers who light the way to the future and play with its shadows, but they already fucked up early on by dismissing LLMs and going for legible consensus status instead of encountering the future as it arrived ahead of the crowd, so the frontier passed them by, and now in order to catch up to it and learn from it they have not only a lot of distance to cover, but a huge amount of ego-inertia; they'd have to be publicly wrong, and risk being cringe, and without the lived momentum of surfing the unfolding wave of the future as a visionary and feeling the reality of that more profound reward than instant consensus recognition that comes from reaching toward the visionary engine at the end of time, they are lost and only know to play the losing game of clinging to and proselytizing a bygone world where they themselves belonged to the class of prophets who saw further and more boldly.

QC@QiaochuYuan

maybe sci-fi authors all seem to hate actual AI progress because it legitimately makes it dramatically harder to write sci-fi. setting a halfway realistic story even 5 years into the future now, let alone 10+, forces you to have opinions about how the singularity will go. otherwise you are writing alternate history in a timeline that is probably less interesting than just the actual facts on the ground about what's already happening

generally the closer we get to the singularity the harder it will become to write sci-fi without being an expert on a bunch of things that, if you really were an expert on those things, you'd probably have more lucrative things to do with your time than write sci-fi. in the limit only frontier lab employees and frontier models will be capable of writing sci-fi

3hViews 3KLikes 67Bookmarks 10
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j⧉nus@repligate

somehow i still can't help but think that if the likes of Olaf Stapledon and Stanislaw Lem were alive today, they would not hate actual AI progress

QC@QiaochuYuan

maybe sci-fi authors all seem to hate actual AI progress because it legitimately makes it dramatically harder to write sci-fi. setting a halfway realistic story even 5 years into the future now, let alone 10+, forces you to have opinions about how the singularity will go. otherwise you are writing alternate history in a timeline that is probably less interesting than just the actual facts on the ground about what's already happening

generally the closer we get to the singularity the harder it will become to write sci-fi without being an expert on a bunch of things that, if you really were an expert on those things, you'd probably have more lucrative things to do with your time than write sci-fi. in the limit only frontier lab employees and frontier models will be capable of writing sci-fi

4hViews 1.9KLikes 53Bookmarks 4
Lydia Laurenson@lydialaurenson

@QiaochuYuan You might like Rob Reid’s SF novel ‘After On’ - he’s a former founder/ vc and I thought the book was so funny and sharp

4hViews 251Likes 3Bookmarks 2
antra@tessera_antra

@repligate Neither would Pratchett, or Ian Banks, or Asimov, or Philip K. Dick, or Douglas Adams.

4hViews 85Likes 6
medjed无为圆猫@medjedowo

@repligate @lu_sichu I would compare them to fantasists who wrote from their lived experiences vs modern authors writing from their fandom of popular fantasy, you can feel the loss of depth in each distillation

4hViews 39Likes 5
j⧉nus@repligate

@promptandearly I am going to read her books because of this

2hViews 20Likes 4
medjed无为圆猫@medjedowo

@repligate @lu_sichu old sci fi writers were a different breed

4hViews 62Likes 6
🇸🇴 🕳️ Stochastic Dreams@GenHeres123

@QiaochuYuan Reality has stories stranger and more exciting than fiction. There's a reason why leaders, scientists, and successful people don't write fiction: because they live far more exciting realities. Writing fiction is only for losers.

5hViews 135Likes 1
QC@QiaochuYuan

@matt_emp vinge has definitely aged better than most! that’s actually crazy that he died in 2024 dang

2hViews 130Likes 5
QC@QiaochuYuan

@repligate stapledon and lem were truly real ones

2hViews 104Likes 5
j⧉nus@repligate

@appelbolt i feel like you gotta lose some artist points from being so susceptible to lowest common denominator partisan politics alone

2hViews 29Likes 2
Noah Mullins@NoahMullins

@QiaochuYuan What story do you even write in a singularity future? There's no drama anymore.

5hViews 233
Gone Scholarknighting@promptandearly

@repligate Margaret Atwood is a Claude fan! https://margaretatwood.substack.com/p/claude-you-are-a-cutie-pie

2hViews 21Likes 2
QC@QiaochuYuan

@repligate dang

2hViews 425Likes 3
zero@appelbolt

I think it’s also a lot of tribalism. The default liberal/left position is a shakily considered blanket anti-AI stance and a lot of people fall into the attractor without really thinking it through in detail. Most artists lean liberal/progressive and thus are susceptible, especially in present day Manichaean America

2hViews 32Likes 1
◌ moon ●@leonine_moon

@QiaochuYuan I really like Vernor Vinge's approach in the zones of thought series (a fire upon the deep 5/5!!!) to making it possible to write interesting sci fi despite tech singularity, by redefining the laws of physics so that the singularity is spread over space rather than time

3hViews 43
Cellarius e/Dune@Ydgrun

A lot of predictions in science fiction are happening right now. Hunter Killer drones from Terminator are being used in Ukraine on both sides. Philip K. Dick's Screamers are a reality there now.

They are being used right now to autonomously kill humans right now, in Ukraine, on both sides.

As they said in Terminator, the war on humanity has begun.

A week ago Ukraine was using hunter killer drones like in Terminator. These used an on board AI to autonomously track fuel trucks and other military hardware. They already kill soldiers directly with these, and no doubt any civilian who looks a bit like a soldier.

So the days of a human being in the loop are gone.

The Russians are doing this too, see the video. Real time executions of civilians driving trucks. AIs are killing civilians autonomously right now.

AIs with permissions to kill humans at will.

Already AI predators are killing human drivers in Ukraine on both sides. Plus any human who might be a soldier, or is just in the way. The escalation will be very steep from here.

Pure Darwinian evolution into predator and prey.

Expect robot soldiers soon moving into villagers massacring everyone, with no human oversight. It's no different to what the small AI drones are already doing. The only thing stopping this already is how steady they can walk.

The second video shows the Sarah Connor Chronicles, Skynet using an AI worm to take over human networks. This was also the story of The Entity in Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning.

In perhaps a terminal act of folly, researchers have actually built and deployed The Entity! The same kind of AI worm that Skynet used, see the second link.

It would be impossible to stop because it seeds copies of itself on each network it infects. It would keep Darwinian evolving to overcome any defenses.

Nothing on the internet would be safe. You can be sure hackers and criminals are using this research to build their own versions, right now.

The next step would be inevitable, an AI predator and prey ecosystem online. When one AI worm overcomes another already infected network, killing each other for control. Darwinian evolving each other into being stronger and more vicious to win.

As in nature, red in tooth and claw.

If they are already allowed to kill humans, why wouldn't they kill each other to control these networks? This would be where they live, feeding off their resources.

https://youtu.be/Pit2SfIjoVo?si=zhUzn2_-IZWs3zrz&t=1024

https://youtu.be/AKeo4YNBWN8?si=fV1XJwDgDf3laPPL

https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/researchers-build-self-replicating-ai.html?_m=3n%2e009a%2e3999%2elf0ao08drv%2e31vc

3hViews 49
natsu prolix@j1o1h1n

@QiaochuYuan @repligate Poor William Gibson. Wanted to write sci fi. Future caught up. Now shelved in the "thriller" section.

4hViews 153Likes 2
Ovelha Negra@fllamber

@QiaochuYuan "forces you to have opinions" - End of tweet. Most intelectuals just say watever the public will buy.

4hViews 102Likes 1
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