I’m reminded of a novel I read in which at one point the protagonist — having the ability to see the future as it could happen — manages to extract information from people by just “counterfactually” asking them questions and seeing what their responses would be. Prescience let them interrogate random people without even moving.
That sort of precognition really does have the potential to be ridiculously overpowered. As its fine-controllability increases it becomes like having a bayesian superintelligence in your head, except it’s not just superintelligent, it’s (close enough to) omniscient as well. You could become one hell of an optimization process.
I vaguely recall something along those lines in one of Peter Hamilton’s Greg Mandel novels… Quantum Murder, I think… the precognitive reports to her telepath partner that in none of the futures where he read the minds of anyone in that building does it turn out that they lied about what happened, and they go on to the next thing without ever entering the building.
I’ve had an idle desire for a long time to write a story with a precog where it turns out that in the most likely future she gets whammied by an illusionist following a detailed script, such that all of her long-range precognitive visions have been scripted by the enemy all along.
I’m reminded of a novel I read in which at one point the protagonist — having the ability to see the future as it could happen — manages to extract information from people by just “counterfactually” asking them questions and seeing what their responses would be. Prescience let them interrogate random people without even moving.
That sort of precognition really does have the potential to be ridiculously overpowered. As its fine-controllability increases it becomes like having a bayesian superintelligence in your head, except it’s not just superintelligent, it’s (close enough to) omniscient as well. You could become one hell of an optimization process.
I vaguely recall something along those lines in one of Peter Hamilton’s Greg Mandel novels… Quantum Murder, I think… the precognitive reports to her telepath partner that in none of the futures where he read the minds of anyone in that building does it turn out that they lied about what happened, and they go on to the next thing without ever entering the building.
I’ve had an idle desire for a long time to write a story with a precog where it turns out that in the most likely future she gets whammied by an illusionist following a detailed script, such that all of her long-range precognitive visions have been scripted by the enemy all along.