Comment by jillesvangurp

What I always appreciated with Neal Stephenson is the level of nerdy detail in his books. It's what makes re-reading his books very enjoyable. Which is something I do every few years or so. Gibson's Neuromancer is often recommended as a thing to read next. But to me that's a very different type of book. Basically, Gibson uses a lot of word soup to create a futuristic vibe and mood but in the end it's just a stylistic thing rather than a coherent view of the future and at this point it's a bit dated. As a vision it was all a bit dystopian and cool at the time. But not very coherent.

Stephenson's world building has a bit more depth to it. You can pick up the Diamond Age today and it still reads well and in a way a lot of stuff that is going on with LLMs make that a super relevant book right now. There are a lot of ideas and moral dilemmas that the book raises. What happens if you take the notion of a poor girl receiving a quality education from an AI and it starts subverting the child's mind with crazily addictive story telling, and adaptive behavior. What happens if you create an army of a quarter million girls with a copy of the same AI book.

The reality of an ipad like device that might have some beefed up version of chat gpt on it that starts bonding with a toddler and executing an educational agenda over years is not that unimaginable any more. A lot of kids know how to unlock their mom's phone before they learn to walk/talk these days. Not the same thing of course but the whole morals and ethics around the topic are exactly what Stephenson explored in the early nineties with that book.

A lot that is science fiction in that book still is; but some of it just became science fact. In the same way, Snow Crash is still pretty fresh. The whole Meta thing a few years ago was directly inspired by that book. And they made a mess of it. We still don't have proper VR. But the tech is definitely getting closer.

Neuromancer never had that quality to me. It's alright as a book but ultimately a bit shallow.