Dawn of AI age brought forward to 2040 but how real can it be?
Rashmee Roshan Lall
PhD. #FRSA Journalism @timesofindia @theneweuropean. Teaching university, London. Ex–BBC etc. UEA. Novel Hachette UK. Sign up below for This Week, Those Books, which has nearly 11,000 followers in 120 countries
Scientists say the clear dawn of the AI age will come before 2040, shaving 20 years off previous predictions. Excerpts from This Week, Those Books on the contradictions of artificial intelligence. Sign up at https://thisweekthosebooks.substack.com/?and get the post and readthrough the day it drops
The Big Story:
All the talk is about embracing AI as the future rather than fearing it. Will we?
Many people already use generative AI tools to translate, transcribe and produce text, images and other material.
AI offers poorer countries the chance to leapfrog whole stages of development – particularly in medical diagnosis and education – just as landline telephones…
…first book pick raises an essential issue:
“How much further there is to go before our machines can argue for their own humanity.”
This Week, Those Books:
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The Back Story:
The first world summit on AI was in Britain in 2023, the second in South Korea in 2024.
While it feels like early days for AI, in the two years since it became front-page news…
This Week’s Books:
Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans
By: Melanie Mitchell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Year: 2019
With AI developments so hot and heavy, a 2019 book might almost be prehistory. But Melanie Mitchell, the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, really puts the issue in context, sketching out the gamut of opinions: “The field of AI is in turmoil. Either a huge amount of progress has been made, or almost none at all. Either we are within spitting distance of ‘true’ AI, or it is centuries away. AI will solve all our problems, put us all out of a job, destroy the human race or cheapen our humanity”.
She traces the story all the way back to 1956, when John McCarthy, a young mathematician, organised “a small workshop” at Dartmouth College. That’s when most people believe the AI field was officially founded. McCarthy invented the term artificial intelligence to distinguish it from a related effort called cybernetics but admitted even then, to something we now instinctively argue about: if the goal is genuine intelligence, how real…
…AI finds it hard to do the things young children can easily do, such as ordinary conversation…
Klara and the Sun
By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Year: 2021
Klara is the quintessential AI being, a solar-powered humanoid robot and the main protagonist in Nobel Prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. She is highly advanced in terms of observation, learning ability, curiosity and even insight…Klara is an Artificial Friend to 14-year-old Josie. This is a dystopian world of the “post-employed”, people whose jobs have been “substituted” by automation, and “lifted” children like Josie, who are genetically enhanced to excel beyond their peers. Josie is gravely ill and Klara eventually makes a massive sacrifice in hopes she gets well.
To my mind, this is the bit that prompts the big questions: What is personhood? Is it the capacity to feel for another?
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