Neal Stephenson: belief

Transcript context

…I have a long question from a reader, which I’ll paraphrase. It basically says, “You seem to be better at predicting the future than almost anyone else, and you’ve done this in a wide variety of areas. What’s your self-awareness as to how this has been possible?” I think there’s a scattershot phenomenon going on, where a science fiction book might include a large number of hypothetical inventions, and the ones that are in there might be described somewhat vaguely. A bunch of those might never get realized, but people very generously tend to forget about those. They give the writer, the novelist, a free pass, and they only take into account the ones that seem to have come true. There’s also some generosity there in that the description of the invention might be a little wishy-washy, a little vague. Then later on, when a somewhat similar real invention gets made, someone’s nice enough to say that the science fiction writer invented this. Say the primer from Diamond Age — do you feel we have that now or soon with large language models? They will teach you almost anything, right? Not how to make a bomb, but anything scientific, anything legitimate. They’ll give you multiple-choice questions. They’ll grade them for you. They’re not perfect, but is that, in fact, what you meant?…

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