Strata
Un monde plat tel qu'on se le représentait au Moyen Âge. Qui avait pu inventer une pareille planète? Pour en avoir le coeur net, Kin Arad n'a qu'une solution: partir à la recherche des maîtres du Disque, direction le centre du monde, un gigantesque dôme de cuivre incrusté dans une île de sable noir.--[Memento].
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What Hacker News says
- I highly recommend the novel Strata by Terry Pratchett, to anyone who is tickled by this question.
- If you enjoy that kind of thing then you might like Terry Pratchett's early SF work "Strata" that riffs heavily on this idea (on a less parochial scale) while also enjoyably sending up Niven's Ringworld and a few other tomes.
- Fun, light-hearted and enjoyable === Terry Pratchett. Strata and the Dark Side of the Sun if you’re looking specifically for Sci-fi. But if you haven’t read the Diskworld series, I envy you! I’d give anything to re-live the sheer ecstasy of reading Pratchett for the first time.
Already mentioned: H2G2 (ditto, would love to be able to read it again for the first time); Ender’s game and sequels; Rama (maybe more thought-provoking than light reading though); basically any Clarke book; basically any Stephenson book.
Another not-quite Sci-fi I’ll put out there is Stross’ Laundry files series: the love child of BOFH and Lovecraft, a really fun read with quite a few hat tips to IT.
- There's something a little like this in Strata by Pratchett (which is lightly sending up Niven's Ringworld and a non-robot-related but similar idea there).
- > Consider that countries known for stronger interpretation of human rights and freedoms, including intellectual property rights, are also the countries at the forefront of innovation, including technical innovation that laid the foundation for LLMs in the first place. I think that is not a coincidence, and we should keep it in mind when there is a push to be dismissive of these concepts (which predominantly serves the interests of commercial LLM operators and their supply chain).
Several fallacies there.
First because China and the USA are opposite ends of the spectrum on many of the ways "freedom" is measured, and yet China is doing pretty well on the innovation front, including with AI. And that China is beating Europe, even though various Scandinavian nations rank higher on such freedoms than does the USA.
Second, cum hoc ergo propter hoc: Correlation does not imply causation. For example in this case, a reason why one of the big IP groups in the USA (Hollywood) got big, was because being in California enabled them to avoid the IP rights of the Motion Picture Patents Company that dominated cinema in the East Coast. I would even suggest that it is the disregarding of IP rights that enables much of the web, not only how and why China is doing well, but also Google (which has had legal fights over the interaction between copyright and search results), social media, and cultural elements such as memes and reaction gifs.
Third: the point of copyright is to encourage new works, because this makes money which can be taxed. All this becomes somewhat irrelevant when AI can also create new works.
If you want to set a bar for creativity high enough that current AI can't reach it, I suspect quite a lot of human works also fail, e.g. that Pratchett's Strata is obviously Ringworld, and that you would exclude from copyright all parts of The Lion King that are based on Hamlet.
> I would still oppose the use of the natural vs. unnatural distinction as the basis of that argument, though.
I'm not sure what you're saying when you "oppose" this. Does that mean you accept that, in principle, there could be some AI which would deserve rights in the category currently (but in principle inaccurately) called "human rights"?
- What you're describing sounds like a search and replace could already do it.
If you mean something more transformative, did Yudkowsky get a licence for HPMOR? Did Pratchett (he might well have) get a licence from Niven to retell Ringworld as Strata? I don't know how true it is, but it's widely repeated that 50 Shades of Grey was originally a fan fiction of the Twilight series.
Etc., but note that I'm not saying "no".
