After being on my literary to do list for decades, I decided to start reading Iain M. Banks' Culture series. These books seem to me to be particularly relevant today, with everyone going on about all this nonsense about AI and what it means for the future of humanity but meanwhile, we don’t even have a clear concept of intelligence, let alone an idea how to actually replicate it artificially. Banks' vision of what actual AI would be like from the ’80s is much more intelligent and coherent than the bullshit the so-called experts of today are cooking up.

Anybody interested in the ethical and moral dilemmas inherent in creating actual thinking machines should probably read these books.

“What does this thing actually look like? I mean you never see them by themselves, they’re always in something … a ship or whatever. And how did it – what did it use to warp with?” “Externally,” Jase said in its usual, calm, measured tones, “it is an ellipsoid. Fields up, it looks like a very small ship. It’s about ten meters long and two and a half in diameter. Internally it’s made up of millions of components, but the most important ones are the thinking and memory parts of the Mind proper; those are what make it so heavy because they’re so dense. It weighs nearly fifteen thousand tons. It is fitted with its own power, of course, and several field generators, any of which could be pressed into service as emergency motors, and indeed are designed with this in mind. Only the outer envelope is constantly in real space, the rest – all the thinking parts, anyway – stay in hyperspace.

— Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987)

For a scientist, that was a serious, almost an unforgivable lapse and Tom Lawson felt very angry with himself. He had let his preconceived ideas affect his powers of observation.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)

Clarke, obviously, understood the scientific method. This is getting rarer and rarer nowadays, where science is increasingly becoming ersatz-religious dogma instead of the search for the truth.

He pressed the Transcription key. Within twenty seconds all twelve pages of his report, impeccably typed and punctuated, with several grammatical slips corrected, had emerged from the office Telefax. He scanned it rapidly, in case the Electrosecretary had made mistakes. She did this occasionally (all Electrosecs were ‘she’), especially during rush periods when she might be taking dictation from a dozen sources at once. In any event, no wholly sane machine could cope with all the eccentricities of a language like English, and every wise executive checked his final draft before he sent it out. Many were the hilarious disasters that had overtaken those who had left it all to electronics.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)

Leaving aside the obvious cultural sexism of the 1960s, I find it fascinating that Clarke not only anticipates AI here, but also the cloud (“dictation from a dozen sources at once”). And, to top it all off, he also anticipates the inherent problem with all of this: That humans still have to check the output of this magical AI cloud, because no matter how advanced, you trust machines at your own peril.

Tom Lawson prided himself, rightly, as a practical experimenter; this was something unusual in an age when most so-called astronomers were really mathematicians who never went near an observatory.

— Arthur C. Clarke, A Fall of Moondust (1961)