That’s all right it can’t be worse than necromancer the movie. That made me hate Keanu Reeves’s face for years. Stupid ducking dolphin.
“For extra verisimilitude we are having AI assist in the screenplay”
That was Johnny Mnemonic, wasn’t it?
Yes that was the title, it was based on Neuromancer thought, no? I saw it in the theater. I blocked out almost everything.
No, it was based on Gibson’s short story of the same name, which was (I think) part of the short story collection called Burning Chrome. I seem to recall that Molly Millions was a supporting character in the story, so I think it was conceptually the same universe as Neuromancer.
Johnny Mnemonic is a very good short story. But the movie was in fact terrible.
Ahhh okay. I had Burning Chrome and I remember Molly Millions, from Chiba city. A few years back, I met a friend who was born in Chiba city named Molly. I cracked up and it was hard to explain why it was so funny.
Another problem with adapting Neuromancer now is that, like, the entire premise of the book is the danger of giving AIs autonomy and access to the world and its data, and the characters making choices based on evaluating that danger.
But, of course, now, as a society, we’ve decided that we should give AIs total control over everything with no oversight. So Neuromancer is kind of over. It’s like doing a ripped-from-the-headlines drama about whether we should allow the widespread use of automobiles.
(Of course, that’s already probably giving too much credit to the writers and producers of the show, who will probably not care about the source material anyway).
We don’t have generalized AI yet, we have very good next token prediction systems. Wintermute is not chatGPT 5.0.
Sure, but if Wintermute appeared today, is there any question that we’d just feed it all the world’s data and allow it to do whatever it wants? And that people would be cheerleading it?
Tom Cruise in the last Mission Impossible movie couldn’t wait to kill off an emergent AI, like it was a master vampire just itching for a stake in the heart. For what that’s worth.
Well, if we could end up with the world of Banks’ Culture books, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea.
More likely to be Terminator though.
Yeah, sadly that seems more likely.
I happened upon this chart of cool '80s-'90s design/decor styles on BlueSky. While there’s a lot it left off – and it’s mostly American stuff, and Neuromancer was a bit more globetrotting than that – I kind of hope the show designers look in this direction and grab a few styles.
Some pretty prominent people are very afraid of the lassez faire approach with AI.
If a Wintermute is possible, I’m not sure how we keep the genie in the bottle.
And it does concern me.
Narrator: We can’t.
I hope they do 80s retrofuturism. Modernizing Neuromancer would destroy it’s setting.
Blacksite CIA Narrator: We didn’t.