2023-11-13 13:30:02
It’s been a year since the promotional launch of ChatGPT placed artificial intelligence in the cast of horsemen of the apocalypse that can end the world as we know it. In a secondary place with respect to climate change but at the same level as other usual suspects such as the fall of a meteorite or a solar eruption that freezes all the circuits on which our daily lives depend. The shadow of AI appears and reappears in various forms in science fiction narrative. And that has been talked about in some of the quotes from Festival 42 of fantastic genres that has been developed in Barcelona. Although between technophilia and technophobia, it seems that the former wins in the genre.
The concept of AI has appeared in science fiction in various forms. “An absolute mix where robots, androids, cyborgs and artificial intelligences are confused,” points out Manuel Moreno, professor at the UPC and author of essays on the presence of science in science fiction. And demonstrating, adds the writer Lola Robles, that the capacity for anticipation of fiction is quite fallible. In many cases it has been drawn in the form of threat to humanity.
The topic of the danger of The rebellion of the machines has accompanied the technological development of humanity. With the precautions to take against robots (Asimov) or their persecution as an oppressed minority (the replicants of ‘Blade Runner’), artificial intelligences with their own ideas (HAL by Arthur C. Clark), supercomputers or AIs that are going to his own (‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, Martha Welles’ Murderbot Chronicles)… We would think that the renewed fears after ChatGPT (and that this was a topic under discussion in the scientific community long before) may be turning AI into the new villain of science fiction, in the style of ‘The Matrix’. But it is not just like that. It does seem that the topics of individual AI, which do nothing more than replicate the mind of a human in an artificial support (or copy it and transmit it, as a plot trick to actually talk about longevity) are passing to some AI as a ubiquitous network, more abstract… and real.
Skepticism
There is something about AI as a neovillain in the trilogy that began with ‘L’extern’, by Ada Hoffmann, with AIs that have defeated humanity and convinced them to worship them as gods. But there are also those who do just the opposite, although it may not seem like it at first, as in the recent film ‘The Creator’, by John David Washington. Ann Leckie, multi-awarded for her trilogy in which the AI of a spaceship migrates from support, is more skeptical. “ChatGPT is not AI, they call it that all the time, it is an illusion but it is not,” he remembers. We write as if it were an existential threat to humanity, people are afraid of it, we assume that AI is going to replace us all, that we are going to be slaves, that it is going to rise up and kill us all. But we are in the real world. And the important thing It is to reflect, taking into account that we are truly approaching artificial AI, how we treat it and what we are.”
There’s Hoffmann He has extra credentials to talk about the subject. In addition to addressing the topic in fiction, she teaches computer science and earned her doctorate with a thesis on the possibility of AI generating poetry. It calms us. Partly. “Although I have written about it in my books, I really I don’t think it is very likely that in the real world Artificial Intelligence will become a superintelligence. Technology companies tell us that we have to be afraid and careful because their technology will become super smart… But if we see how it works, the only thing it is good at is replicating the patterns it sees in the ways words go together. It does not have what we call ‘simple grounding’, the ability to connect what the words say with physical or sensory experience or really understand what they mean. The tech companies are deliberately exaggerating, asking for attention, because that makes them more money, helps them attract investments from people who really believe that with this technology they will take over the world. But it’s not like that”.
Pedagogy
MJ Bausà has written the young adult novel ‘Mía’s Dream’ (Destino), with teenagers who move directly within an AI, together with the artificial intelligence specialist Marta R. Costa-Jussà. In her case it is clear that “the villain is the human” and is committed to education (and in the case of his book, dissemination) as an antidote: “Anything that we do not understand and see as magic, we will perceive as a danger. The mixture of advanced technology and ignorance is a danger.” However, he understands the fears (Arthur C. Clarke, remember, was already talking about how depressing a future in which humans are not the most intelligent would be) and agrees that in the face of a “technology that can be used to serve or to enslave” The challenge of fiction is to contribute ideas to the debate of “redefining what we are and what the machine is.”
Tannia R. Tamayo, chemist and economist, has just published ‘The Weight of Smoke’, a novel in which the population of a planet in a distant future and time leaves all their worldly concerns “in the hands of a compassionate and benevolent artificial intelligence, H; But that – he specifies – has a price. In his case, he has had time to consider before publishing the book the impact of ChatGPT, “the wishbone that has changed the debate that until then was taking place in academic circles.” On the one hand, he warns that this tool is much more effective than is often said, although we are still at the level of “weak AI, machines that know how to do one thing but nothing else, they do not apply it to another area.” However, he warns that we are in a “moment of takeoff” and that “The advent of superintelligence is not impossible, maybe within 10 years, or 50.” That is, may the day come when “the algorithm learns to apply in one area what it learns in another, reach the baseline of humanity’s intelligence, pass the Turing test.” “In a matter of a short time, a few years, we will reach this technological singularity in which pessimists see the end of humanity,” says Moreno.
“We in science fiction are the good guys, it’s better that we come up with ideas of what to do then, because the bad guys are already at it,” Tannia R. Tamayo half-jokes. What is in whose hands is key. And the UPC professor remembers that AI is in the hands of private initiative, so governments cannot sustain the investments necessary to research it. and experts on the subject migrate from universities and public research centers to the private sector. While this is happening, he maintains, science fiction has a function: “It is capable of raising questions that science is not capable of answering and providing alternatives, many of which will never become reality.” But some, yes.
How is science fiction beginning to rethink the figure of AI? “I don’t think there is a singular trend,” Hoffmann responds. It’s okay to explore lots of ideas. In the coming years, what I hope is a fiction more committed to explaining how it affects human values. in the present and how that can be extrapolated in the future. There are some really interesting issues in the ethics of AI as it exists today: how it absorbs biased data, or what will happen to people whose jobs are automated. There will be a lot of fiction here in the coming years.”
Lola Robles is among the technophiles. Remember to what extent some advances can help people like her, with a significant visual disability. “We can be more optimistic. I think we should remember that “AIs are created and deep down they have the same feelings and prejudices as their creators,” American science fiction writer Cat Rambo adds in her talk with Ann Leckie. Yes, but hey, maybe that’s the problem.
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