SF, LLM, AI, AGI and Humai

The International Space Station flies over Wandsworth Park in London

Science fiction is hard. Firstly, its necessary to invent a future technology which is plausible, interesting and consistent, both internally and with the laws of physics. Then reality keeps pushing forward, making the future for real.

Two of the big themes of Noctilucents are space travel and artificial intelligences or AIs, and these technologies seem to be developing at different rates. Space travel seems to go slowly, with over fifty years since the last time humans walked on the moon and Mars still being years away. The International Space Station (ISS) is often seen in the sky, as in the photo above, but it is already old, with talk of a fiery death in the atmosphere.

AI, meanwhile, seems to be accelerating fast, driven by a technology called large language model or LLM. This is very useful, but for specific tasks, such as summarise documents describing complex phenomena - such as indeed LLM.

But LLM are not the AI as described in Noctilucents, which is better described as artificial general intelligence or AGI. This is yet to be developed, but is considered to have the flexibility and (potentially) consciousness of humans but with much great intelligence, including scope, memory and speed compared to humans. It is generally considered that LLM not only is not AGI but isn’t sufficient a technology to achieve AGI - see this discussion.

AIs such as Humai, Unverified and Zeus in Noctilucents are AGIs: they have awareness, of themselves and the real world, agency, concept of themselves, and presumably consciousness of some form, maybe more than humans in that as well as every other dimension.

BTW, there is a clue as to Humai’s objectives and design in its name, which is shortened form of “Human AI” - but more on that I’ll leave to book 3!