Thunderhead
by Neal Shusterman · first published 2018
4mentions
1recommended by
2HN commenters
2018–2026first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
HUMANS LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES. I CANNOT. I MAKE NOT MISTAKES. The Thunderhead is the perfect ruler of a perfect world, but it has no control over the scythedom. A year has passed since Rowan has gone off grid. Since then he has become an urban legend, a vigilante snuffing out corrupt scythes in a trial by fire. His story is told in whispers across the continent. As Scythe Anastasia, Citra gleans with compassion and openly challenges the ideals of the "new order." But when her life is threatened and her methods questioned, it becomes clear that not everyone is open to the cha
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Thanks — corrected! Did you enjoy Thunderhead even more than Scythe (like I am, 2/3rds done)? Some absolute insanity... poor "Scythe" Tyger's deception! Book was recommended to me by my now-attorney, after rambling about LLMs enabling commoners…
on “Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1” ↗…I've since read and absolutely re-recommend. Written in 2016 (same year as Attention is All You Need), it eerily hypothesizes many of the SciFi complexities that omnipotent general AIs now already-do ("Thunderhead" in scythespeak). [1] Ursula K. LeGuin ~translation~, similar to Buddhist concept of "life is suffering"
on “I Have 30 Years of Career Left. AI Made Me Rethink All of Them” ↗There's a very popular young adult novel out called Scythe written by Neal Shusterman. In this novel there is a benevolent cloud-based AI in charge of ruling over the whole world named The Thunderhead ( because The Cloud wasn't impressive enough). It's cool to see part of this fictional world coming to life
on “Someone has entered an AI in a Japanese mayoral race” ↗…over Thieme's Mindgames. ---- I'm currently halfway through Neal Shusterman's Scythe Trilogy, which he published right before LLMs became reality. A ficticious global AI entity, known collectively as "Thunderhead," begins each chapter with its own all-knowing passage about how it perceives humanity's progression. It's really quite creepy reading, with many of Shusterman's ficticious Thunderhead passages having…
on “Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1” ↗