> For example spaceships swarming with low skill level crew members that swab the decks and replace air filters.
This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly.
But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change.
But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely?
It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.
This reminds me of my favorite note [1] from Ursula Le Guin on technology:
> Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren’t interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I’m fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.
> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
Yeah that tracks. If we're being real, there won't ever be much of actual human exploration beyond Earth, it'll all be done with fully automated systems. We're just not physically made for the radiation and extremely long periods of idle downtime. Star Wars has the self-awareness to call itself fantasy as some kind of exception, even though 99% of all other other sci-fi is pretty much that too.
Seeing drones do all the work unfortunately isn't very interesting though.
While it doesn’t touch on AI at all (that I remember, I think there is some basic ship AI but it’s not a major plot point and it never “talks”) the Honor Harrington series is “Horatio Hornblower in space” and I highly recommend it.
Also I love the Zones of Thought series and The Culture.
This is largely a function of what science fiction you read. Military SF is basically about retelling Horatio Hornblower stories in space, and it has never been seriously grounded in science. This isn't a criticism, exactly.
But if you look at, say, the award-winning science fiction of the 90s, for example you have A Fire Upon the Deep, the stories that were republished as Accelerando, the Culture novels, etc. All of these stories assume major improvements in AI and most of them involve breakneck rates of technological change.
But these stories have become less popular, because the authors generally thought through the implications of (for a example) AI that was sufficiently capable to maintain a starship. And the obvious conclusion is, why would AI stop at sweeping the corridors? Why not pilot the ship? Why not build the ships and give them orders? Why do people assume that technological progress conveniently stops right about the time the robots can mop the decks? Why doesn't that technology surpass and obsolete the humans entirely?
It turns that out that humans mostly want to read stories about other humans. Which is where many of the better SF authors have been focusing for a while now.