SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
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What is magic the name of? (AI In science fiction)
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If you want to talk about AI specifically, I think this is a good use of this thread, otherwise, we have this thread here which might be good for discussing your thoughts on what the "line" is between SF and F (if there even is one!)
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Hmmm I think I am going to stick to magical AI here then :)
I mean, are sci-fi and fantasy really that different anymore?
Space feels more and more like a kind of new fantasy setting... huge, mysterious, full of laws we barely understand. And technology itself… it’s starting to feel like magic. The more advanced it gets, the more invisible it becomes.
Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” but I think it’s even deeper than that. Maybe magic is the name we give to something that science can’t explain, but also can’t avoid....
And then I think about Foundation. In Asimov’s world there’s this moment where scientific discovery slows down — less and less new knowledge...
And the more the universe "resists" to explanation, the more it becomes, mystical, magical. beyond our reach, but not beyond our wonder. Probably the two being linked.
More and more tradition and ritual.... less facts.... more beliefs, more magic... an appeal to higher forces beyond what some consider failing logic. Sometimes I wonder if that’s happening now. Theoretical physics, for example, is struggling to make big new breakthroughs. Sometimes I think that words like "consciousness", "the subjective experience", "the universe", and even AIs that are here and now are concepts and presences not fully... "graspable".
It feels like what we don’t know that we don’t know is getting harder to pass. And we start using AI almost like an oracle, a muse, a spirit (I’m using that word on purpose) to try and find new patterns and new laws. Our relationship with technology starts to feel prophetic, ritualized.... almost like religion coming back under another name.
Antiquity always comes back, they say, with new versions of gods, new names for magical phenomena, just adapted to the time.
What do you think? How do you see this appearing in books you read or write? And is unexplainable high technology in sci-fi just another name for magic? Are science-fiction and fantasy bound to merge ?
Hope you found my rumblings interesting and can't wait to read your point of views :))