AI has a strong boom/bust cycle. We're currently in the middle of a "boom." It's possible that this is an "eternal September" scenario where deep networks and LLMs are predominant forever, or...
Thanks! "The Slaying of the Spaniards" sounds like something out of Borat, but it shows how we take things like international rescue operations for granted these days
Same. It wasn't clear how to choose an instance, so I ended up creating accounts in three different places and posting a couple times before settling on this account. I haven't used the other accounts in months, so they're part of that surge.
Sure, good point, I think of the movie Arrival as two parts:
For most of the movie, a scientist is struggling with a novel interesting scientific problem with guidance from subject matter experts who have established environmental knowledge but not theoretical insight, with a great deal of interference from funders, with inter-team rivalries and a collaborator / competitor tension with similar teams around the world. The problem in question is based on linguistics with the type of thoroughness that is never shown on screen and rarely in print SF. (Compare it to the "Shaka when the walls fell" episode of TNG. I like that episode! But it's cartoony by comparison.) So both the practice and the principle of the research shown has a scientific basis, and if the movie had ended with the lead scientist solving the problem then I think we'd all agree it's Hard SF. However, we also have the last part of the film.
You question the scientific plausibility of the last part of the film. Regarding the story the film is based on, apparently:
In the "Story Notes" section of Stories of Your Life and Others, Chiang writes that inspiration for "Story of Your Life" came from his fascination in the variational principle in physics. -source
but I don't know enough to judge that and though it was kind of uplifting, the last part of the film was qualitatively different from the first, and I agree seems a lot less "Hard SF".
To recap, I argue that at least the first part (a majority?) of the movie is Hard SF. Now the question is: does the last part disqualify it from a) being on this list and b) being Hard SF? Regarding a), the authors of the list say "Contact is hard sci-fi by association because it's not a very realistic film" so they are taking a very forgiving definition of Hard SF. Therefore I stand by my assertion that Arrival is qualified to be on that list. By virtue of the quality with which the first part of the movie proceeds, I argue that it also deserves to be on that list. Regarding b) whether Arrival is Hard SF beyond the definition used by that list I am less certain.
Both the book and the screenwriting required the invention of a form of alien linguistics which recurs in the plot. The film uses a script designed by the artist Martine Bertrand (wife of the production designer Patrice Vermette), based on scriptwriter Heisserer's original concept. Computer scientists Stephen and Christopher Wolfram analyzed it to provide the basis for Banks's work in the film.[32][33] Their works are summarized in a GitHub repository.[34] Three linguists from McGill University were consulted. The sound files for the alien language were created with consultation from Morgan Sonderegger, a phonetics expert. Lisa Travis was consulted for set design during the construction of the scientist's workplaces. Jessica Coon, a Canada Research Chair in Syntax and Indigenous Languages, was consulted for her linguistics expertise during the review of the script.[35]
Take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
AI has a strong boom/bust cycle. We're currently in the middle of a "boom." It's possible that this is an "eternal September" scenario where deep networks and LLMs are predominant forever, or...