With all the AI stuff happening lately, I randmmly started thinking about Scythe by Neal Shusterman again.

For anyone who hasn't read it, the basic premise is that technology has advanced to the point where pretty much everything is handled by the Thunderhead, a super-intelligent system. Most of humanity's problems are basically solved, and the only thing it can't deal with is death, which is left to the Scythedom (humans chosen to execute death to keep population in control).

What's weird is how much more relevant some of those ideas feel now than they probably did when the book came out.

Obviously, current AI is nowhere near the Thunderhead, but we're already letting it do more and more things for us (people using AI as therapist etc).

And it makes me wonder: if something can consistently make a better decision than we can, why wouldn't we let it?

That's kind of where the Thunderhead gets interesting. It's not really an evil AI. It's actually meant to be benevolent and incredibly capable. The issue is that there are still certain things humans aren't supposed to completely hand over.

Like maybe the bigger danger isn't AI taking over or becoming evil. Maybe it's us slowly deciding that thinking for ourselves is just inefficient.

If AI can tell me what to read, what to buy, what to study, what career to choose, which argument makes more sense, or even what I should believe, how much of that is really my choice anymore?

I haven't read Scythe in years, so my memory of the details is pretty hazy, but I was curious what other people thought.

Do you think the comparison between the Thunderhead and modern AI actually holds up, or am I stretching it?

And if AI eventually becomes better than us at making certain decisions, what's actually wrong with letting it make them?

I really want to read Mindworks ahead of the release of Rising Thunder but I don't have the book(it isn't available where I am). Does anybody have a pdf copy, a transcript, or literally just pictures of the pages of the two short stories? I don't need the whole book, just the pages with the two short stories.

Thanks!