So I read ‘Diamond Age'

There appears to be an internet consensus that Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age is crucial artificial intelligence sci-fi. In fact, one thing certain people like about it is the fact that he calls the technology “pseudo intelligence” — an apt pejorative, in the view of AI’s haters, for a technology they believe to be over-hyped.

Nell gets this “book” — the primer — which is hard to picture as a book. Why would you turn pages when the text on the page can change? But, anyway, it’s a book in the book — not a tablet. Fine. Maybe e-ink wasn’t a thing yet, or maybe Stephenson was just trying to push our conception of the possible? But, whatever the object is, her educational multimedia text changes itself to give her the story she would like while also nudging her to learn things she needs to learn to be successful and independent minded. 

Two other girls in the book also have a copy of it, the daughter of the very rich man who commissioned the invention and the daughter of the man who actually built it. It seems like those two girls will also be important, but they are not really, in the end.

I did not like the book. I think this will the last Stephenson book I read. 

His vision of the future is too messy. I’ve never been to Hong Kong, but reading Stephenson always feels like I feel when I look at pictures of Hong Kong. His vision of the future is extremely cluttered with gadgets and accessories and a cacophony of people shoved up against each other operating from wildly different frameworks.

Maybe tomorrow will be like that. He might be right! But that doesn’t mean it’s the picture I want to put in my imagination.

All that said, it’s interesting to see what a passive vision of AI he had before we reached the LLM future. The primer doesn’t particularly have any personality or agency. It just makes what Nell needs. It doesn’t really seem to have much of an opinion about it.

In fact, Nell doesn’t even really interact with the primer directly, at least not in a conversatinal way. The picture you get is that it’s more like a Choose Your Own adventure book.

Now that we have AI in our lives, they are functioning more like actual people, or at least minds. The conception of AI in the Diamond Age feels a long way off from what we’ve come up with, though now that I’m here writing about it, it’s a little hard for me to quite articulate why. 

Addendum:

Even though I think I’ve decided I just don’t really like reading Stephenson (this is the third book of his I've finished, and the fifth I have attempted), I recognize that he’s maybe one of the three or four most important living sci-fi authors (I have a pet theory that everyone who likes this genre is either wired for William Gibson or Stephenson — I am the former). 

He is important and he will remain important. There will be English grad students who do PhD’s about his work. Now that we are in the future, one vein of meaning that I think is worth mining in Diamond Age is his conception of the human voice.

A key character in the book serves as the voice of Nell’s primer, because Stephenson writes that AI’s could not convincingly recreate human voices. That is basically already not true. I personally love listening to the Substack voices, though there are moments when they kind of miss rendering certain sentences. Still, they aren’t off-putting. And they will only get better.

What does it mean that Stephenson didn’t believe that computers could simulate our voices, even though they could do a fair job of imitating thinking? Something to mine there. It could be that Stephenson foresaw something true even if he wasn’t precisely right.

—Brady Dale
September 26, 2026