Ted Chiang
2000 · Nature
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5 selected excerpts · 5 total mentions
"we’ve built systems so complex we no longer fully understand them. We must now use scientific methods - originally designed to understand nature - to comprehend our own engineered creations." Ted Chiang saw that one coming: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
Ted Chiang has a (very) short story exploring this idea, with metahumans replacing data centers here: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
If you want smaller, quicker payoffs (but in no way cheaper!), consider the anthologies of short stories by Ted Chiang. Most of them are 15-45 minutes to read, with a couple longer (1-2 hours). I've read both "Stories of Your Life and Others" and "Exhalation" in the last month and I turned to my wife and said "that story just blew my mind" for probably 75% of the stories. You can find a few online. Here is a very short but brain-tickling example: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
I'm reminded of Ted Chiang's short story Catching Crumbs from the Table HN linked to a little while back: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
>The article doesn't really provide any evidence that he was 'deifyed' Deified might be an extreme way of putting it but Mr. Hawking once attended my university to give what looked like a fairly ordinary physics lecture, and not only was the room full to a brim, three other rooms where the lecture was projected were, and people were sitting outside on the grass and watching it on a projector. If another physics professor of similar caliber had given the lecture I can tell you they would have had trouble to attract a few dozen people. He undoubtedly was a major celebrity, which I guess in our modern secular times is somewhat like deification. I mean at that time you…
wouldn't have been able to tell the uni campus apart from a new age cult event. There were people intently listening to the lecture who I know for a fact had not the slightest idea what he was even talking about and just soaking it in like if they were listening to some preacher reciting ancient scripture. This mystification of science which Hawking stood for always reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679
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