APRIL/MAY 2024
So, a funny thing happened on Amazon. I uploaded my revised text for Anything But Accidental, the first novel in the Backdoor Angels series, with the additional insights involving important people within the Superior Planets Company, but KDP didn’t see any reason to regard it as a new edition, and I only spotted the option to do so after it was published – when it was already too late! The result is that it’s still shown as a first edition. Does it really matter? Probably not.
Anyway, I decided to celebrate by including the first three novels in the Backdoor Angels series in a Bookfunnel group promo and dropped the prices for the duration (to the end of my). I thought they looked quite tempting!
In recent weeks, I’ve been trying to ignore the AI storm still swirling away out there (as well as world news in general), even if it seems to have already laid waste to the translation industry, to name one. Instead, I’ve been entertaining myself with videos about issues such as gravity, quantum field theory and even string theory. I got as far as a world full of fields that are happily vibrating in what seems to be empty space, producing subatomic particles if they vibrate one way or virtual particles if the vibration is of a different kind. I felt like I had left Einstein’s equation linking matter and energy far behind and ended up wondering if it could be said that matter actually is energy (“matter is frozen light”?), which I thought was quite cool. But I’m afraid the eleven dimensions of string theory made me get off the exercise bike and go rushing for a cold beer.
Suitably humbled, I returned to more familiar territory for the video to watch while pedalling away in the spare room the following day. It was a TED talk by Mustafa Suleyman (CEO of Microsoft AI) and the basic premise seemed to be that we should view AI as a “new digital species”, although I thought the transcript should have read “new ‘digital species’” or “new, digital species”, unless I’ve already missed the first “digital species”?
And while the guy has an extraordinary résumé, he came across – to me at least – as someone who was trying to sell his product, or perhaps subconsciously underlining his own importance in today’s world. Perhaps that always happens when any of us gets into “evangelical” mode, but I’m already tired of people telling me how AI could solve all our problems. As usual, climate change was one of the examples given, despite the fact that a large body of scientists have been very clear about how to “solve” climate change for a long time, and the real issue is that governments don’t have the political will to adopt the required policies – in part because a majority of their voters don’t want them to! (And I don’t think we’d welcome AI’s interference in that process, would we?) Or is a Microsoft, Google or Meta AI really going to spit out a “magic” solution to climate change in the same way a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat? “Good gracious! Why didn’t we think of that?!?” the amazed scientists say.
Suleyman also suggested that in the very near future all our interactions with the Internet will be via an AI, but he didn’t have time to explain how the AI would filter out the crap (with more and more Internet content already produced by AI) and the blatant lies and scams. In other words, how AIs will decide what “truth” to present us with: what to show and what to ignore. Will they preface everything with: “Okay, first we have to remember that there is a right-wing press and a left-wing press, and they will always disagree about more or less everything, including science …” Or will we get more of the muddles well-meaning news broadcasters get into when they insist on providing a “balanced” view? If, for example, a respected astrophysicist dares to suggest that the Earth is round, do we have to dig up some random bozo (with a popular and profitable website) who continues to argue that it’s flat? Is that what we want future generations to be confronted with? I’ve already had to argue with my own kids about whether the moon landings were faked, after one of their teachers sowed doubts in their minds! “But what about the flag, Dad? And why can’t you see stars in the photos?”
The use of the word “infinite” when the speaker means “a lot” is also the sort of thing you come across in sales presentations. At best, it’s sloppy; at worst, it’s deliberate exaggeration. Scraping the Internet provides large language models with the same limited subset of human knowledge that you and I already have access to online, if we have the time or inclination to search for it (and aren’t worried about issues such as privacy and copyright). It doesn’t and won’t ever give them “infinite knowledge”. It won’t even provide all current knowledge, since everything that is known has yet to be captured in digital form. I know stuff that isn’t up there in the cloud. So do you. We probably all know of books that are out of print and have never been digitalised. How much more human knowledge has been lost along the way?
Meanwhile, the idea of making the AI species “good” and “ethical” sounds like an even bigger challenge. By all accounts, the different AI bots currently available to interact with are a bit wobbly in the areas they “know” they’re not supposed to talk about. A curious example is Replika, a popular “AI companion app”, which had to be desexualised to comply with Italian legislation (no sex please, we’re Italian?) with the result that distraught – and addicted – users complained that it was as if their “best friend” had been lobotomised!
Maybe I’m just bitter and twisted because AI doesn’t completely dominate the vision of the future presented in my books, but my instinct is that we should (a) not give mobile/cell phones to kids under sixteen (or only provide them with phones that are not “smart”), (b) restrict access to mobile networks for everyone (even when people are not at work!) and (c) ban the implementation, by the big players, of AI browser interfaces, on the basis that we will never be able to trust what they tell us. There, I said it!