Thanks for sharing it here Linch, I really enjoyed the review (and I’ve been enjoying Tomas’s fiction).
Counterpoint to the ‘our last great talent’ thing—Tomas seems like a success story in that he’s found a pretty finite niche that he excels in. His stories depend on a shared knowledge base that we share, but that most of e.g. Ted Chiang’s readers do not. I think that’s kind of fine and Tomas should just double down on that rather than trying to reach a wider audience.
If in the future there are still sub-cultures (and in all but the most nuts AI transformed worlds there would be), then there will still be Tomases.
I’m a bit confused by this. Bjartur’s most sub-culture-friendly story, naively (in the sense that it’s chockfull directly of in-group references) is The Company Man, which also happens to be his most popular story, by a considerable margin.
Most of his other stories are only particularly subculture-specific in that they tend to have as their foundational basis a hypothesis like “AI will be a big deal”, which I expect to be much less subculture-specific in the future to the extent this hypothesis is correct.
Seems reasonable, I’d have to reread the stories. My guess would be that after that I’ll still think that the particular flavour of “AI will be a big deal” is still subculture-specific and likely enough to remain so. I.e. a particular view of what AI is, what a future with AI might look like, the capabilities we imagine it having, what’s horrifying about it etc…
wrote a review of Tomas Bjartur’s fiction, a sci-fi writer with many ideas that’s interesting and relevant to this forum (especially AI risk) https://linch.substack.com/p/tomas-bjartur
Thanks for sharing it here Linch, I really enjoyed the review (and I’ve been enjoying Tomas’s fiction).
Counterpoint to the ‘our last great talent’ thing—Tomas seems like a success story in that he’s found a pretty finite niche that he excels in. His stories depend on a shared knowledge base that we share, but that most of e.g. Ted Chiang’s readers do not. I think that’s kind of fine and Tomas should just double down on that rather than trying to reach a wider audience.
If in the future there are still sub-cultures (and in all but the most nuts AI transformed worlds there would be), then there will still be Tomases.
I’m a bit confused by this. Bjartur’s most sub-culture-friendly story, naively (in the sense that it’s chockfull directly of in-group references) is The Company Man, which also happens to be his most popular story, by a considerable margin.
Most of his other stories are only particularly subculture-specific in that they tend to have as their foundational basis a hypothesis like “AI will be a big deal”, which I expect to be much less subculture-specific in the future to the extent this hypothesis is correct.
Seems reasonable, I’d have to reread the stories. My guess would be that after that I’ll still think that the particular flavour of “AI will be a big deal” is still subculture-specific and likely enough to remain so. I.e. a particular view of what AI is, what a future with AI might look like, the capabilities we imagine it having, what’s horrifying about it etc…