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When you read literary fiction or review the design of extreme engineering, like the Mars rover, you are struck by how much more of it is consciously chosen or painstakingly optimized. The reason is trying to pack a lot more reality into fewer words/atoms.
This is not “realism.” It’s not that Ulysses is more “realistic” than say a pulp western or that the Mars rover is more “real” than a cheap Kia. It’s that there’s a lot more at stake, lot less room for error, and far higher cost of evolutionary learning through trial and error.
Most fiction and design have a ton of slack because there is design room you can waste. Lots of variables can be indifferently phoned in. But extremes have less slack. If something isn’t essential or influential, but merely interchangeable, it’s a sign there’s slack to eliminate.
Humans are the bottleneck in authorship btw. Designs and fictions are limited in complexity by how much detail individual human brains can be opinionated about. As a result, when you throw machine learning at human design domains weird things can happen.
Check out the Autodesk gallery in SF if you get a chance. All sorts of weird ML-generated designs no human would ever think of. Because ML procedural generation can handle vastly more detail.https://www.autodesk.com/gallery/exhibits …
Many engineered artifacts are already featuring a high percentage of machine-generated design content. Mostly in hidden parts we can’t see, otherwise we’d be creeped out by the clearly alien aesthetics at work. This isn’t AGI btw, nor a portent of it. This is narrow, closed AI.
Fiction is going to be harder than engineering, but ultimately it’s the same sort of problem — working in bigger design spaces and binding a greater proportion of interchangeable detail in opinionated, influential ways, that go beyond nominal function and feel more like home.
In a way, this is the purpose of all synthesis, construction, creation etc. To make ourselves more at home in the universe rather than understanding it. Turning abundance into serendipity, and the apathy of the universe into serendipity. Immanetize the eschaton etc.
I think this is fundamentally the appeal of fiction of the sort represented by Iain M. Banks Culture novels. They are about presenting a vision of a benevolent domestic cozy universe, engineered for human delight. The fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism is a side effect.
This bends back over your recent thoughts on optimistic/pessimistic approaches. The more exact you require yourself to be (whatever your reasoning for that), the less room there is for error and the more detailed your implementation needs to be. I prefer optimistic and loose.
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