AI is advancing even faster than Stephenson imagined

Every time I read about another advance in AI technology, I feel like another figment of science fiction moves closer to reality. Lately, I've been noticing eerie parallels to Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel "The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."

"The Diamond Age" depicted a post-cyberpunk sectarian future, in which society is fragmented into tribes, called phyles. In this future world, sophisticated nanotechnology is ubiquitous, and a new type of AI is introduced.

Though inspired by MIT nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, the advanced nanotechnology depicted in the novel still remains out of reach. However, the AI that's portrayed, particularly a teaching device called the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, isn't only right in front of us; it also raises serious issues about the role of AI in labor, learning and human behaviour.

In Stephenson's novel, the Primer looks like a hardcover book, but each of its "pages" is really a screen display that can show animations and text, and it responds to its user in real time via AI. The book also has an audio component, which voices the characters and narrates stories being told by the device. It was originally created for the young daughter of an aristocrat, but it accidentally falls into the hands of a girl named Nell who's living on the streets of a futuristic Shanghai. The Primer provides Nell personalised emotional, social and intellectual support during her journey to adulthood, serving alternatively as an AI companion, a storyteller, a teacher and a surrogate parent.

The AI is able to weave fairy tales that help a younger Nell cope with past traumas, such as her abusive home and life on the streets. It educates her on everything from math to cryptography to martial arts. In a techno-futuristic homage to George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play "Pygmalion," the Primer goes so far as to teach Nell the proper social etiquette to be able to blend into neo-Victorian society, one of the prominent tribes in Stephenson's balkanized world.

Three recent developments in AI — in video games, wearable technology and education — reveal that building something like the Primer should no longer be considered the purview of science fiction. In May 2025, the hit video game "Fortnite" introduced an AI version of Darth Vader, who speaks with the voice of the late James Earl Jones. While it was popular among fans of the game, the Screen Actors Guild lodged a labor complaint with Epic Games, the creator of "Fortnite." Even though Epic had received permission from the late actor's estate, the Screen Actors Guild pointed out that actors could have been hired to voice the character, and the company — in refusing to alert the union and negotiate terms — violated existing labor agreements.

In "The Diamond Age," while the Primer uses AI to generate the fairy tales that train Nell, for the voices of these archetypal characters, Stephenson concocted a low-tech solution: The characters are played by a network of what he termed "ractors" — real actors working in a studio who are contracted to perform and interact in real time with users. The Darth Vader "Fortnite" character shows that a Primer built today wouldn't need to use actors at all. It could rely almost entirely on AI voice generation and have real-time conversations, showing that today's technology already exceeds Stephenson's normally far-sighted vision.

Synthesising James Earl Jones' voice in "Fortnite" wasn't the only recent AI development heralding the arrival of Primer-like technology. I recently witnessed a demonstration of wearable AI that records all of the wearer's conversations. Their words are then sent to a server so they can be analyzed by AI, providing both summaries and suggestions to the user about future behaviour. Several startups are making these "always on" AI wearables. In an April 29, 2025, essay titled "I Recorded Everything I Said for Three Months. AI Has Replaced My Memory," Wall Street Journal technology columnist Joanna Stern describes the experience of using this technology. She concedes that the assistants created useful summaries of her conversations and meetings, along with helpful to-do lists. However, they also recalled "every dumb, private and cringeworthy thing that came out of my mouth."

These devices also create privacy issues. The people whom the user interacts with don't always know they are being recorded, even as their words are also sent to a server for the AI to process them. To Stern, the technology's potential for mass surveillance becomes readily apparent, presenting a "slightly terrifying glimpse of the future."