Review by panda-man
Dec 9, 2020This is an amazing book. Stories in this collection not as hard as some of Egan's other works but they still are as hard sci-fi as can be. I really enjoyed the writing and thought-provoking themes, and I'd highly recommend to people as the first book of Egan to read (especially to people who fear that they need STEM degree to read his works) - just to get a glimpse of what this amazing author can do.
But what truly amazed me was correct predictions the book contained:
1) Deep-fake technology and it's usage for adding deceased actors to movies. (see latest Star Wars)
2) Algorithmically generated texts that are indistinguishable from human's. (see GPT line of language models, google GPT-3 examples)
Second one was especially impressive to me, since Egan predicted that it can be achieved algorithmically without Artificial General Intelligence. Most other sci-fi writers of foretime predicted that we'll need either AGI for creative tasks or that even AGI wouldn't be able to be creative. (remember the famous line from I, Robot "Can a robot write a symphony?")
Predicting future is really-really hard. To predict even two technologies almost 30 years before they were realized shows just how truly visionary Greg Egan is. I'm looking forward for the next 50 years, to see just what else he predicted in this book that just hasn't come to pass yet.
This is an amazing book. Stories in this collection not as hard as some of Egan's other works but they still are as hard sci-fi as can be. I really enjoyed the writing and thought-provoking themes, and I'd highly recommend to people as the first book of Egan to read (especially to people who fear that they need STEM degree to read his works) - just to get a glimpse of what this amazing author can do.
But what truly amazed me was correct predictions the book contained:
1) Deep-fake technology and it's usage for adding deceased actors to movies. (see latest Star Wars)
2) Algorithmically generated texts that are indistinguishable from human's. (see GPT line of language models, google GPT-3 examples)
Second one was especially impressive to me, since Egan predicted that it can be achieved algorithmically without Artificial General Intelligence. Most other sci-fi writers of foretime predicted that we'll need either AGI for creative tasks or that even AGI wouldn't be able to be creative. (remember the famous line from I, Robot "Can a robot write a symphony?")
Predicting future is really-really hard. To predict even two technologies almost 30 years before they were realized shows just how truly visionary Greg Egan is. I'm looking forward for the next 50 years, to see just what else he predicted in this book that just hasn't come to pass yet.
