Has anyone anticipated a system like Alexa or Siri still working after a disaster, and being understood by non-technological people as a genie or a god answering requests from believers?
This is averted in Darkover Landfall by Marion Zimmer Bradley - when the survivors of the crash realize that they are stuck on this world and will have to make the best of it, one character realizes that the ship’s computer is becoming an oracle that their descendants will worship as a god, and so takes steps to prevent this from occurring by destroying the computer. Kind of like applying the prime directive to your own children…
In my own work, “Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb” (a 1992 computer game taking place in a post-apocalyptic world, one in which humans have gone extinct but their uplifted animals remain), the “Orb of Storms” is a Macguffin which can predict the weather (actually a terminal to an ancient satellite network), which lets them know when to sow and when to plant, etc. The protagonist goes on a quest to recover the stolen orb, and fails - but in doing so gains the knowledge needed to develop a much more trustworthy tool: a calendar.
I started writing my own SF epic novel just weeks before suffering a stroke which ended my teaching and writing careers. I have recovered 90% in the last two decades, but alas, now my problem is lack of free time.
It told the story of a Paleolithic tribe that had just enough leisure time to play with stacks of pebbles. Simple games at first, then basic counting, then rudimentary computation using a crude abacus laid flat on the ground. The next steps (which I didn’t get to) were to manipulate these stacks in more complex ways than just pushing pebbles onto and pulling them off of stacks and to implement the beginnings of a stack ‘language’ (a very simple FORTH).
This was a bootstrapping process, a mechanism fundamental to learning, from individual to family/friends to tribe to posterity.
I hadn’t made up my mind whether to write it as an alternate history (which the invention of computers before agriculture would have to be), or whether to have them defeated by a natural disaster, or perhaps an apocalyptic end caused by that technology’s god-like power. Character development was a fun part of the effort.
Perhaps the bone-tool scene at the start of “2001 A Space Odyssey” (1968) was the inspiration, I don’t know. That was an important movie that is an answer to several TASAT questions. As is any history or speculation about the Antikythera Mechanism.
It should be noted that Nature had computation long before we ever climbed down from the trees. The ribosome is one example.
I started writing my own SF epic novel just weeks before suffering a stroke which ended my teaching and writing careers. I have recovered 90% in the last two decades, but alas, now my problem is lack of free time.
It told the story of a Paleolithic tribe that had just enough leisure time to play with stacks of pebbles. Simple games at first, then basic counting, then rudimentary computation using a crude abacus laid flat on the ground. The next steps (which I didn’t get to) were to manipulate these stacks in more complex ways than just pushing pebbles onto and pulling them off of stacks and to implement the beginnings of a stack ‘language’ (a very simple FORTH).
This was a bootstrapping process, a mechanism fundamental to learning, from individual to family/friends to tribe to posterity.
I hadn’t made up my mind whether to write it as an alternate history (which the invention of computers before agriculture would have to be), or whether to have them defeated by a natural disaster, or perhaps an apocalyptic end caused by that technology’s god-like power. Character development was a fun part of the effort.
Perhaps the bone-tool scene at the start of “2001 A Space Odyssey” (1968) was the inspiration, I don’t know. That was an important movie that is an answer to several TASAT questions. As is any history or speculation about the Antikythera Mechanism.
It should be noted that Nature had computation long before we ever climbed down from the trees. The ribosome is one example.
I believe you want the MacAffrey novel Dragondawn.
This was also covered in Jack Chalker’s Spirits of Flux and Anchor and Midnight at the Well of Souls books where
…reality is to some degree controlled by a computer, and programs may be written so as to re-write reality.