Our minds are like large language models (LLM) used in artificial intelligence (AI). We must be exposed to words and concepts before we think about them. Few people can conceive of new concepts on their own. Take for instance the idea of dinosaurs. Can you remember when you first acquired the imagery and ideas about dinosaurs? Or remember the process?
I remember being in elementary school and trading a kid for four plastic dinosaurs. I knew about dinosaurs only vaguely – just a kind of giant animal. The kid told me their names: brontosaurus, triceratops, stegosaurus, and tyrannosaurus. I couldn’t spell those names, or even pronounce them — I might have remembered them at the time as bronto, tops, stego and rex. I didn’t understand about prehistory, or archeology. This might have been after The Flintstones came on TV in 1960 when I was eight or nine, so I probably assumed dinosaurs and people coexisted somewhere. Even then I remember having dreams about dinosaurs when I was six. My dreams were about people living with dinosaurs and having to walk through giant piles of dinosaur shit. They were just humongous creatures that made people feel little.
Unless the concept of dinosaurs come from some kind of ancestral memory, I had learned about them previously somehow. I probably saw them on TV or in a picture book. Like LLMs, my dreams, and conscious concepts about dinosaurs were confused and surreal, sort of like AI art that hallucinating. Eventually, around the time I was ten, I started reading nonfiction books, and I probably read about dinosaurs. I didn’t understand the timescale or science behind them, even then.
I was twelve before I understood the concept of science fiction. But I had been exposed to many science-fictional concepts before that. I struggle now to recall how rocket ships, space travel, aliens, robots, interplanetary and interstellar travel, apocalypses, and time travel first came into my young mind.
I was born in 1951 but I didn’t learn what “science fiction” meant until 1964. That means before I was thirteen, science fiction as a concept didn’t exist to me even though I encountered science fiction movies, television shows, comics, and books. The school libraries I used didn’t have science fiction sections. The Homestead Air Force base library I used did have a science fiction section, but it was in the adult area, which I didn’t visit until 1964 when I was in the eighth grade.
My earliest introduction to science fiction was in the 1950s where I caught old science fiction movies on television, and from a few TV shows for kids that were science fiction. I’m sure some SF themes came from The Twilight Zone which began in October 1959, around the time I turned eight. I didn’t know what the term science fiction described then even if I heard it. They just had space travel and robots, concepts I liked. In the 5th and 6th grade I occasionally found books with space travel or robots in the school library. I remember going up and down the bookshelves trying to spot them. One of the first books I discovered after Tom Swift Jr. and Danny Dunn, was the When Worlds Collide/Afterwards Worlds Collide omnibus. This was in the sixth grade, and I remember my teacher reading a bit of A Wrinkle in Time after lunch every day. If she mentioned the phrase science fiction, I can’t recall.
Then I found The War of the Worlds, Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Mysterious Island in the Scholastic Books flyer handed out at school in the seventh grade. They were the first science fiction books I owned. Maybe the term was on the cover, but I don’t remember if I noticed. Finally, I found the science fiction section in the eighth grade, and I understood the concept well enough to know that it pointed to the kinds of books I loved to read. I still didn’t understand genre, or anything about the history of science fiction.
However, my point here is even before I read science fiction, I had encountered several of the main concepts of science fiction. I had vague notions of rocket ships long before I understood the solar system or the galaxy. The 1950s was a time when people often talked about UFOs. I had a vague idea about aliens from the skies. One of the scariest films I saw on TV as a kid of the 1953 film, Invader from Mars, about a boy who sees a flying saucer land in a field behind his house. I was about the age of the kid in the film, so I really identified with him. The invaders were taking over the bodies of humans. That was also true of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). I don’t think aliens were ever good during this period.
There were other science fiction movies I saw before I understood what science fiction was, that had a profound impact on me. They were The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Destination Moon (1950), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and Target Earth (1954). I think I saw them when I was in the fifth and sixth grade, but maybe earlier. However, I think I had vague notions about rockets, space travel, and aliens from even earlier sources I can’t remember. I know my parents never mentioned these concepts, nor my teachers. The 1950s weren’t like today where science fiction is everywhere. I didn’t meet another science fiction reader until I was in the tenth grade, in March of 1967. It was the middle of the night, and I was traveling to Miami with my mother and sister on a Greyhound bus, and got to talking to a young guy in the army.
I do know I didn’t understand time travel until after I knew about science fiction. It was when they showed The Time Machine (1960) on NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies, I think sometime in 1965 or 1966. I was in the ninth grade. The idea just blew me away. I had not read The Time Machine by H. G. Wells before that. I might have been exposed to other time travel stories by then, but I don’t think so because the film really made an impact on me.
I had encountered the concept of surviving in a post-apocalyptic world often in science fiction books and movies, but it wasn’t until I read Earth Abides by George R. Stewart in my second year of college that I truly grokked the concept. And it’s taken me decades of reading to explore all the variations and history of the concept.
If you’ve ever “conversed” with an AI, you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say that you can sense where LLMs get their awareness of a concept by knowing the sources they studied. You can’t really blame AI minds for producing crappy answers when you understand how you got your own crappy versions of concepts.
A lot of people only understand science fiction concepts from watching Star Trek, or other TV shows or movies. I’m sure interstellar travel is a hazy thought in their minds. It’s only until you read books by rocket scientists, astronomers, and physicists that those hazy thoughts crystalize into any kind of detail picture. And realistic understanding takes a lot of work.
One reason why computer scientists are having trouble improving on the accuracy of AI minds is because AI minds go through the same learning process we do, and it’s exceedingly difficult to fill in all the details on any concept, especially when we learn so much from fiction and gossip.
Science fiction generated a lot of concepts people love, but they’re only vaguely conceived, in much the same way as a child goes through processing them. You can deepen your knowledge about all the main science-fictional concepts by reading a lot of science fiction. Like how LLMs learn. But to fully grok these concepts you must read science books, but even popular science books can’t perfectly convey the details of learning science at the experimental and mathematical level, something I’m not sure LLMs can do yet.
I wrote this essay to help me remember. I wanted to remember a time in my childhood when I first encountered different concepts popular in science fiction. But I also wanted to remember the details of my childhood. And I wanted to remember the names of the books and movies. I’m forgetting such details. For several of the movies, I had to use Google and Wikipedia to recall the names of films that I’ve seen many times over my lifetime. I write these essays to keep details in my mind to help me to remember them. If I don’t write these essays I forget more and more.
I find AI and LLMs very enlightening because how they work is close to how we work. I assume that current LLMs aren’t conscious. At one time I wasn’t conscious either. I think self-awareness came to me around age four. But the years between then and adolescence were years of vague awareness of how reality worked. Even at 72, I realize that we never grok anything fully. We’re always filling in more details. It’s quite revealing to do a mental archeological dig into my mind, to explore the layers of awareness. It’s also sobering to discover that many concepts we cling to are vague, even faulty, or fantasies.
This has been a fun exercise, trying to remember when I first experienced the sense of wonder when confronting a new science-fictional idea. I could write a whole lot more, even a long, detailed memoir, and never be finished. But this is enough for now.
Can you remember the evolution of science-fictional concepts in your memory?
James Wallace Harris, 7/23/24
