A vision of LLMs as encountered in the 2130s after societal recovery from a near-terminal civilisational collapse. From What We Can Know pg 116:
Our students are permitted limited access to NAI. To prevent over-dependence, they must sit before an approved desktop. They also need to wait five days before they get their next shot. The kids mostly want advice on relationships, parents, music, fashion and money. They murmur their confessions and questions and get an immediate response. The Machine, as they like to call it, knows when it is being asked to write a student essay and will terminate the session. In written form, guidance can run to half a dozen single-spaced pages and is, I think, sensible and robust, though I know that others disagree. The tone is comradely. A response to an anxious question from a nineteen-year-old might begin, ‘I believe she’s trying to tell you something here and I’d say it’s time for you to be more reflective and analytical about your own behaviour. Remember the trouble you were in last year.’
NAI knows about a respondent’s life in intimate detail and its memory, of course, is long. The kids like that. They feel important, known and cared for. They are proud of an accumulating dossier that tells of their escapades, successes, disasters and growth. NAI is a friendly aunt, concerned, critical and worldly. The young make confessions to her they would not dare make to close friends or parents. Dossiers can swell by more than 200 pages a year. The kids boast to each other of admonitions as well as praise they’ve received. They enter early adult life as heroes in an epic of trivia and passion. Young newlyweds can destroy a marriage by swapping files, but many insist on it. People continue their consultations through life and seem reassured that neither the state nor commercial entities have access to the material. But confess to a crime and NAI will turn you in.
Most of us in the Humanities Department are wary of taking personal problems to a lifeless piece of software, however sophisticated. Our privileged allotment is every other day. Over in Science and Tech they have unlimited access. The scientists we know are more inclined to take their marriage or career problems to NAI. Along our corridor we tend to approach it as a research tool. I’ve made use of her during my Blundy research and received useful notes on background reading and social contexts. NAI lets me know who’s doing what in my field, who might be trespassing on my territory and who is following an interesting lead.
Rose was forthright. ‘Idiot! Don’t you dare give up. Talk to NAI.’ I resisted, then one afternoon, with little else to do, I sketched out some questions for this beloved program that some in the Philosophy Department believe has attained consciousness. Nonsense, the hard tech people have told me. Pure projection. NAI is no better than the systems of the 2030s. Lack of progress hasn’t been down to know-how. Our various forms of disaster and chaos have blocked the development of better machines and software. No gallium and germanium or even copper in the Surrey Hills! I asked NAI to go back to the two years before and the immediate period after the Second Immortal Dinner and speculate freely for me about the network of private relations around Blundy, and to suggest where I might take my investigations next. Most of what came back was familiar
Mark Carrigan 