As the great Artificial Intelligence Mania hurtles forward toward its denouement, techno-optimists and AI-doomsters agree that it will have world-altering consequences. The unanswered question is what form this alteration will take. Will it be universal prosperity, or disaster? And if the latter, will it be the historically familiar financial crisis that invariably occurs at the tail end of a febrile investment boom, magnifying the incipient revolt of the public against AI? Or will it be more like science fiction, as one of the frontier models runs amok, best case by emptying all the accounts from a medium-size bank—which might also cause a financial crisis—or worst case by escalating the cyberwar between the superpowers to the point of World War III?
Having written in my last column that history was pretty much dead, this time I’ll go with sci-fi as our guide. Economic history is of course replete with examples of new, world-altering technologies. But from fire to the internet, no previous innovation has had the potential to replace humans altogether.
I’ve written elsewhere that you cannot hope to understand the potential impacts of AI if you don’t read science fiction. I stress the word “read.” Distant memories of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix don’t count. At a minimum, you need to know William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” to understand the full range of imaginable outcomes—from malignant corporate supercomputers to cuddly AIs we raise (or abuse) from infancy.
And you absolutely must read the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.
Banks is long dead, but his estate will have benefited greatly from this summer’s reading recommendation from the world’s richest man. Elon Musk’s interview last month with Zanny Minton Beddoes of The Economist was a classic for many reasons, but the most illuminating segment was when Musk began to channel Banks, explicitly acknowledging that his ideas about the impact of AI came straight from the novelist.
