Looking back at the last decade of AI development, it’s become obvious that a lot of science fiction didn’t end up predicting how AI (or AGI) would be built. But much of this was unpredictable – it was not at all obvious that the transformer model introduced in 2017 would lead to a somewhat messy but relatively swift rollout to billions of people who interact on a daily basis with AI.
I agree with Ursula Le Guin that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” To me, the interesting parts of science fiction isn’t how accurately it extrapolates into the future, but rather, given a future circumstance, how might be?
However, this did get me curious: which stories got it right? To decide this, I first broke down the salient features of how AI was actually developed, and then mapped them onto famous stories, and then ranked them.
