Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence - James Lovelock and Brian Appleyard (2019)

 

Rating: Excellent

James Lovelock was an important scientist who, among many achievements, saved humanity with his discovery (using one of his inventions) that CFCs were building up in the atmosphere and damaging the ozone layer. Lovelock also posited the Gaia Theory, that Earth is a self-regulating, synergistic system in which life maintains a habitable environment for itself, co-evolving with the inorganic environment in order to keep the planet cool, despite Sol's efforts to the contrary. The ideas behind Novacene go beyond organic life on Gaia toward the claim that the ultimate evolutionary endpoint for Earth will be cybernetic life based on information, which does seem to be the universe's universal currency. Lovelock refers to this soon to arrive era as the Novacene, despite the proposed current era of the Anthropocene not having been fully accepted as yet. Despite the small page count, Lovelock takes his time to explain his background reasoning, moving through his thoughts regarding life in the universe (he feels Earth contains the only existing life - I disagree), the meaning of our existence (we are are universe knowing itself - an idea I've always have been attracted to) and Earth's battle to contain the heat threat via its Gaian systems, something humanity is fast despoiling, which could be the end point of the Anthropocene I feel, although Lovelock begs to differ. According to Lovelock cybernetic life will, rather than destroying us, want to work with us in order to keep Gaia from overheating, an outcome he reasons would be just as bad for them as it would be for us.

Lovelock's thought processes and theories are fascinating and logically extrapolated. Lovelock genuinely believes that humanity will be the creators and midwives of cybernetic life which will exist on such a superior plane to us that we will be regarded in the same way that we regard house-plants. Such notions have been well explored by others, that AI's processes will take place at such accelerated levels that we will be more than redundant, however Lovelock's assertion that cybernetic AIs will want to keep us around goes against many accepted (pessimistic) theories on the subject, but his reasoning on this subject appears fairly sound and persuasive, although I don't agree with everything. Since Novacene was published we've seen the emergence of ChatGP and other such (for the moment) primitive AI systems. They are crunching information at frightening rates and interacting with humans in a sophisticated manner, however they are still not real AI, not conscious, self aware entities (that Lovelock pictures as spheres). Within this current context Novacene is a fascinating book and should be read by anyone interested in AI or the future of humanity. Along the way we also learn that Lovelock inadvertently held Stephen Hawking in his arms as a baby, was an advocate for nuclear power, but also that he was an extremely moral human, whose contribution to humanity was profoundly significant. Lovelock lived to be 103, but not long enough to see his Gaian Theory become accepted, nor to see humanity come to grips with human-caused climate change, but I hope he is correct about AI needing us around. Perhaps among the intractable problems that AI could help solve is the best and fastest way to terraform Mars, a planet Lovelock describes are totally inhospitable to life and a pipe dream for humanity. Then we would have the insurance of two homes. Although I hold no optimistic hope for humanity, you never know, maybe our future spherical AI overlords will really help us out.

This review is dedicated to my friend Eileen Bogart, who enthusiastically attended my library based book clubs and engaged with me with genuine warmth. Novacene was one of the many books she gifted to me before she passed a few months ago. I'll always remember you fondly Eileen, you were both interesting and interested, a quality not always found that readily among humans.

Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

 

Rating: Admirable

I'm in two minds about Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro has produced a fine novel, his first since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, and the breadth of his ambition is to be admired, with some intriguing themes dealt with in a subtle and intelligent manner, however I did not actually enjoy the novel particularly. Klara and the Sun is another stab at 'literary science fiction', in a similar vein to Never Let Me Go (2005), as has been noted by some critics, which is a reasonable summation, although to be fair to Ishiguro there are some fairly significant differences. The eponymous protagonist is an AF (artificial friend), an AI humanoid android, who is purchased by the mother of fourteen year old Josie to keep her from being lonely while she spends her days isolated, learning online and being afflicted by a mysterious illness. The illness, once you come to understand its nature, is not so mysterious and is one of the more morally ambiguous themes explored in the novel. Klara is a very capable AF, both intelligent and benign, but also surprisingly naive. Although as the novel progresses you learn just how society has been negatively transformed by humanoid AI androids, Klara herself is shown to be nothing but kind to those around her, in fact she is much more caring than the stressed out and fickle humans. The human characters are mostly average people living in what appears to be a radically altered culture, although the reader is never privy to the mechanisms behind these changes, they are only hinted at. The majority of the human characters are merely the end users of these radical technologies, trying to cope with the moral and practical challenges they present. 

Although Klara is a fascinating protagonist, the fact that the story is related from her point of view means that the novel has an almost flat one dimensional tone that does not easily allow narrative tension to build. Klara's narrative voice is predominately observational in nature, so that often the novel is weighed down by excessive descriptions of what the characters are doing, how they are relating to each other and why they are doing the things they are doing. A trip in the car becomes a tedious affair due to the fact that Klara relates every single thing about it. I often found myself speed reading or skipping ahead to more significant portions of the narrative, which is always an unfortunate outcome for the reader. The novel is also imbued with a melancholic tone and a feeling of quiet desperation on the part of the human characters. Sometimes there is an ominous, bordering on disturbing aspect to some of the more curious parts of the novel, however it occurred to me that Klara and the Sun is like a 'light' version of a J G Ballard novel, relatively unsettling, but ultimately not unsettling enough, which is a shame really, as there are important themes at play that could have made a greater impact if the narrative had been more dynamic.

As a postscript yesterday I facilitated the last of three library book club session to discuss this novel and the groups were roughly split into thirds, with one third loving the novel, another third opining that it is a failure and the final third being somewhere in-between, which is where I stood. It's certainly a divisive novel, which, as is often the case, led to in depth discussions and quite a few people coming away with a greater appreciation of the novel's finer points. I came away from these discussions thinking that, despite its flaws, Klara and the Sun is a subtle and thematically sophisticated novel. It makes me wonder how the novel will be regarded in, say, ten years time. As an important novel? Or as an underrated cult classic? Given Ishiguro's status it will probably not fade away and perhaps it will glow more brightly in its afterlife. Part of me kind of hopes so...

Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI - edited by John Brockman (2019)

 

Rating: Admirable

It is fitting that Brockman dedicates this collection of essays about AI to "...Einstein, Gertrude Stein, Wittgenstein and Frankenstein." Brockman explains why in his introduction, which I will not go into, however that last name - Frankenstein, is very fitting, as that's how I see humanity's obsession with creating artificial intelligence, an obsession that says a lot about human hubris. What people refer to as AI at the moment is really nothing of the sort, merely powerful computers using algorithms to crunch data that then suggests varies outcomes or possibilities. I read Possible Minds hoping that it would give me greater insight as to where we are right now and where we are possibly heading in terms of 'true AI', however ultimately I came away relatively disappointed. 

An overarching aim of the collection is to comment on and expand upon a foundational text called The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) by Norbert Wiener, who apparently was the father of cybernetics. I'd never heard of Wiener, so that in itself was interesting, however throughout the essays the necessity of referencing Wiener sometimes seemed to be holding the essayists back, or perhaps I just became sick of hearing about him. The essayists themselves produce work that falls into three broad camps, those that are wary (although not too wary, on the whole) of the risks posed by AI; those that are not really worried at all, as long as humanity imposes 'control' on AI (they point out that, after all, as the creators, we can readily impose adequate controls) and those that produced essays that either focussed tightly on their field of study or expertise, or were flights of fancy that came across as slightly indulgent. I did learn quite a bit by reading these essays, however some were just downright boring! Curiously no essayists mentioned the potential of quantum computing as a means to producing true AI capability. I'm no scientist, but I remember that when I read about the recent breakthroughs in developing quantum computing that was the first thing I thought of; surely it has a significant role to play in potentially developing AI?

Westworld's conception of AI

A curious consequence of reading Possible Minds is that I've come away thinking that true AI will never happen. Of course I may well be wrong, but nothing I read here convinced me otherwise. Also, as I mentioned above - the sheer arrogance! The brains of living creatures on Earth have been honed over millions of years and we think that we could create AI within a century? Also brains, particularly human brains, are considered to be the most complex objects in the known universe, in terms of the complexity of neural pathways. Also we really do not have much of an idea how the brain and in particular, consciousness and sentience, works. Some theorists have speculated that there is perhaps a quantum element to consciousness - it could indeed be that deeply complex. Personally I think that it is more likely that the future of humanity lies in the convergence of biology and technology - we'll become cyborgs eventually (well, more cyborg in nature as technically even someone using glasses is a cyborg). Perhaps I've been influenced too much by the likes of Altered Carbon (TV series: 2018-20). Perhaps in the near, or far future, we'll be uploading our consciousness into quantum computing generated cyberspace, or perhaps fragments of it. What is certain is that computers will become far more powerful, but true AI? Let's wait and see...