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-John Thornhill
To generalise heroically, the entire arc of world literature can be
summarised as follows: writing about gods, then kings and queens,
then ordinary people and, finally, ourselves.
But having exhaustively explored the divine and almost every
dimension of the human, we are plunging deeper into a new era of
literary history: writing about machines. And that may even presage
the most startling evolution of all: machines writing about humans
and perhaps, one day, machines writing about machines.
Literature, sometimes described as crystallised emotion, contains the
very essence of the human experience. So what will it mean when
machine intelligence trespasses into human territory? Will it open up
exciting new vistas of understanding and insight? Or will it only
highlight our own diminishment in the cosmic scheme of things?
Almost every day brings a startling new advance in the field of artificial
intelligence (AI), the seemingly magical general-purpose technology of
our times. In 1997, the world was stunned when IBM’s Deep Blue
computer beat the greatest chess player of all time, Garry Kasparov.
Although impressive in its way, Deep Blue was little more than an
immensely powerful rules-based calculating machine, a “$10m alarm
clock”, in Kasparov’s irritable phrase.
But more recent advances in Deep Learning techniques, combined
with an explosion of data from our smartphones and computers and
massive increases in computing power, have enabled machine-
learning programs to perform an increasing array of tasks as well as (if
not better than) any human: interpreting radiology scans, flying
aircraft, identifying images and recognising speech (just ask Siri).
Google DeepMind’s defeat of two of the best players of the ancient —
and fiendishly complex — Chinese game of Go in 2016 and 2017 also
captivated a global audience. Using a very different technique from
Deep Blue, AlphaGo’s success stemmed from “learning” by itself,
defying 2,500 years of accepted wisdom about the game. Little
wonder that some Chinese researchers called this a “Sputnik moment”
for the country, stimulating a massive increase in spending on AI amid
talk of a new technological arms race.
All this buzz about AI has also sparked the imagination of some of our
most inventive novelists, among them Jeanette Winterson and Ian
McEwan. Once the exclusive preserve of science fiction, thinking
robots have now entered the literary mainstream. McEwan’s most
recent muse is none other than Demis Hassabis, the luminous founder
of Google DeepMind.
This latest fascination with AI is that it reframes the eternal debate
about what it means to be human, challenging our conceptions of
identity, creativity and consciousness. AI is both the apotheosis of the
rational scientific thought of the Enlightenment and, possibly, its
damnation too. Are we approaching the day, the Israeli historian Yuval
Noah Harari has asked, when computers will know us better than we
know ourselves?
IJ Good, the mathematician who worked alongside Alan Turing in the
code-breaking team at Bletchley Park during the second world war and
was a pioneer of AI, was one of the first to grasp the full significance
of an “intelligence explosion”.
Once ultra-intelligent machines surpassed the intellectual level of
humans, he wrote, then they themselves would be able to invent even
better machines, leaving us far behind. “Thus the first ultra-intelligent
machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that
the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control,”
he wrote in 1965.
That moment of technological singularity, should it ever happen, has
been compared with the creation of a new life form, elevating Homo
sapiens to sit alongside God. Unarguably, it would be the most
significant event in 300,000 years of human history. According to the
scientific writer James Lovelock, it would also signify the end of the
300-year Anthropocene age, during which Homo sapiens has wielded
planet-changing technologies, and the arrival of the Novacene, the age
of hyper-intelligent machines.