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\u2014which might also cause a financial crisis\u2014or worst case by escalating the cyberwar between the superpowers to the point of World War III?<\/p>\n
Having written in my last column<\/a> that history was pretty much dead, this time I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve written elsewhere<\/a> that you cannot hope to understand the potential impacts of AI if you don\u2019t read science fiction. I stress the word \u201cread.\u201d Distant memories of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix don\u2019t count. At a minimum, you need to know William Gibson\u2019s Neuromancer<\/a> and Ted Chiang\u2019s \u201cThe Lifecycle of Software Objects,\u201d to understand the full range of imaginable outcomes\u2014from malignant corporate supercomputers to cuddly AIs we raise (or abuse) from infancy.<\/p>\n And you absolutely must read the Culture novels of Iain M. Banks.<\/p>\n