There's a LOT to be said about the intrigue of a cyberpunk setting that houses a cesspool of cultural amalgamation, especially with token icon occupations of said culture peppered throughout it. Case is a computer "cowboy," Molly's an assassin, ninjas and mobs with ridiculous names are common place in a sanctioned black market city, and that's the tip of the iceberg in the material world. I like the setting and some notions I'd formulated about it so much that for the first time in my life I won't focus on the AI's in an AI centric story.
I said it briefly in class, but I want to clarify and expand my claims here as well. A lot of times in futuristic sci-fi, it's pretty fair to assume that a lot of things and dynamics become antiquated, like how a lot of things are in Star Trek, so it's odd to have things like pay phones in the future. Neuromancer goes, quite purposely so, above and beyond that in the most inane of ways. There are major geographic shifts compared to the past (a.k.a our contemporary world or our world when the book was written), which isn't too insane, and there are still major, international wars, which is sadly not a surprise considering how things are going nowadays (a.k.a terrorist radicals, poorly handled asylum for immigrants resulting in mass death, general disagreement between powers, Trump, etc.). These are the kinds of things that you'd sort of expect, along with the general advancement of technology, although perhaps not on the level of a matrix, construct personality AI's, so on and so forth. It's odd, and for some like me somewhat invigorating, to see odd little anachronisms or eccentric things by today's standards as common place, like the absence of horses or the fact that throwing stars are a normalized weapon.
Then there are the people who exist in a world where all of these things and occupations are common place. Clearly they wouldn't step back and realize how insane everything is. A century or two in the future (being hopefully optimistic), people are going to look back and be astounded by the fact we didn't allow people to get married because they didn't meet a gender quota, where as of right now it's sadly a common thing that still exists. Being a dude that occasionally hops into the digital realm to hijack and smuggle info or manage transactions is a revered and unquestioned occupation, same as a samurai with razors in their fingers or a construct with the brain scan imprint of a dead dude, yet for some reason we draw the line at semi-omniscient, 100% artificial made program that's sentient. You can have an out of body experience in the matrix or when you literally put yourself in someone else's shoes/sensory input, but god-program level AI is too much. The duality in Neuromancer, rather the consistent duality in the genre of cyberpunk in general, constantly baffles me, much to my enjoyment.
Oooh, interesting! If I'm understanding you-- It kind of makes sense that they would be freaked out about a (maybe sociopathic) godlike AI, right? Isn't that potentially a death sentence for anyone at any time?
ReplyDeleteI love the stuff about things that are strange to us being commonplace and vice-versa, particularly in the context of this book. It explains so little to us, and just expects us to pick things up. Even that moment of exposition about the matrix comes in the form of a kid's tv show.