I think I remember this story, I read it in the late 70’s from a collection, might have been Bradbury, Silverberg, or Sturgeon? I remember the bit where a scientist shot two bullets into the mutant’s cell at random to prove somehow that the mutant could see into the future rather than reading the shooter’s mind. IIRC the mutant was discovered and captured already in fully adult form, perhaps after having matured very rapidly. During the short period the story covers, one of the scientists proposed that in the future his descendants might be able to see farther into the future rather than the mutant himself. The mutant was handsome and had golden skin, very attractive mutations that would help ensure future opportunities for his abilities to be passed on.
And I don’t remember the title either, sorry.
Fairly sure it’s The Golden People by Philip K Dick
“The Golden Helix” maybe?
Golden Man, sorry. Golden People was Fred Saberhagen.
You are right, thank you! That was it!
I’ve been think about that story, in the context of AI, and what we might be able to develop in the future if we continue down the LLM path. No true intelligence, no sentience, no agency - but the ability to determine the optimal next move with near supernatural accuracy.
There’s also an episode of Rick and Morty called Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat where Morty follows whatever course of action a “death crystal” shows will lead to a desirable future, without knowing why those actions are beneficial.
Ooooh, that’s a really good connection! It even has examples of Morty learning to communicate not being thinking through sentences and saying then out loud, but by making random sounds that bring him closer to the future he desires until they form words. You could imagine the mutant from The Golden Man learning to communicate vocally in the same way - I had that thought after reading the story, but never connected it to what Morty does in this episode!
Heh, and we find out the problem with that plan…
Morty follows whatever path will lead to him dying of old age with Jessica, his school crush, comforting him. He assumes this death would come at the conclusion of a long and happy life with Jessica. But in the stinger after the credits at the end of the episode, he overhears her talking to her friend, and telling her that her dream is to be a hospice nurse and to comfort dying elderly people who are lonely.
Same thing happened when Harry Potter took the Potion of Luck.
Help me @Andy_L , you are my only hope.
This was a show that I saw, don’t believe it’s a book actually, but I could be wrong.
It’s a dystopian future where an Amazon-like robot has gone out of control and has taken over society in a ruinous way. Some of the survivors want to figure out how to disrupt the machine and get access to its central systems. They concoct a plan to exploit the fact that the system keeps sending packages that nobody wants or orders.
The key plot point is that they try to introduce some exceptional handling by submitting a customer service request stating that the merchandise they received was “pizzled”. The idea is that the machine wouldn’t understand the complaint and would send a live person (or someone like it) who would might create an opening to attack the system. It didn’t work, the machine had anticipated the exploit, the rest of the plot is unimportant.
I was absolutely dead-certain that it was Black Mirror. Google isn’t much help (as it often isn’t) but I searched the Black Mirror episode list and saw nothing like it. I feel like my mind is pizzled, please help.
Autofac Autofac - Wikipedia by P K Dick and naturally adapted in an episode of PK Dick’s Electric Dreams
Amazing, thank you! Yes I did watch the TV adaptation of Electric Dreams right after I finished Black Mirror, now that I think of it.
I might have done well to remember this show was focused on post-consumerist dystopia rather than social media.
It’s a classic story - I think I read it the first time in 1977
I really liked that episode. Actually I liked almost every episode of Electric Dreams. Black Mirror much less so.
An easy one I guess: the government sends a starship with a crew of scientists to a nearby star, with the professed goal of colonizing (or studying?) the planetary system. It turns out, however that the real goal is to make the scientists become more inventive because they have no distractions on the trip. The story is narrated as a series of communications sent by the scientists to Earth.
I learned about this story here on SDMB but can’t find the post anymore.
*The story is told with two narrative devices—reports from members of the crew of the U.S. Starship Constitution alternating with a traditional third-person narration of the activities back on Earth. *
…
In the first report from the starship, the reader learns that the ship is approximately one month into a multi-year journey to the Alpha Centauri star system, where the crew will begin colonization of the planet Alpha-Aleph. Already, the crew is finding they have too much free time and have begun filling that time by studying various problems in mathematics.
…
As the story progresses, the reader is told that the existence of the planet Alpha-Aleph is a hoax, perpetrated not only on the American people but also on the crew of the starship. The true purpose of the mission is to place the crew in a position where they will have nothing to do other than study mathematics.
Or there’s the novel form of the story: Starburst.
Sounds very familiar as a short story from Analog or Asimov’s science fiction mag, but maybe not the same. In this story they returned to earth to reveal they’d developed something new in human abilities. I recall some reference to surgery performed without anesthetic using sexual pleasure instead. At the age of 15 or 16 that was the most memorable part of the story to me.
That happens in the story
That sure seems like a lot of wasted effort when they could’ve just had the scientists’ moms turn off the TV. That’s how it worked in my house.
I asked about that story in this thread back in 2019 (#369).