by Sean Monaghan
Will advanced AI allow humanity to flourish in unexpected ways, or will it cast its creators aside? Sean Monaghan considers this question in the blog post below, as well as in his latest short story, “Bridges,” available in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
When I first drafted “Bridges” the concept of AI—Artificial Intelligence—had been around for a long time, and there were inklings of it beginning to slip into the mainstream. I’d been fascinated by the “This Person Does Not Exist” image-generating page, with competitive AI systems creating an image that looked photographically like a person, but was really an amalgam of elements of faces from a huge database.
In the time since I completed the story, AI has become far more mainstream. ChatGPT apparently gained 100 million users faster than Instagram or TikTok. People are using it daily. Businesses are using it, and other similar systems, to analyze data, respond to customers and develop plans.
There are plenty of commentators more qualified than I am about the subject. I imagine that some of them are even AI themselves.
One of my favorite comparisons was discussing whether the advent of AI would be like the printing press or the atomic bomb. Is this a boon or the end of civilization as we know it? Star Trek or Terminator?
With my story, I started looking a long way out. More than decades, probably more than centuries. AI is still around, and imperfect, but we humans are but a sideshow.
Perhaps you, or someone you know, puts out seeds or sugar water for the birds? On my morning constitutional I sometimes see a woman going around with a can of cat food, gifting spoonfuls for strays.
These animals would do fine without us, but we feel good helping them. That’s my take, at least for this story, on AIs in the future. Humans would do fine, but AIs toss us the equivalents of seeds and spoonfuls of canned food.
And the AIs are not quite right. They’re not particularly benevolent, nor malevolent, nor are they human. They’re something else.
They look at the world a certain way, that’s not quite the way that we would look at it.
Much of the discussion I’ve seen seems to fall into two camps. Those who see job losses and, even, human redundancy. And those who see opportunity. Ways to free up the mundane drudgery of much of human existence.
And the AIs are not quite right. They’re not particularly benevolent, nor malevolent, nor are they human. They’re something else.
Creative people who see opportunity in the way that AI can create visual art, music, even writing. Perhaps not finished works, but works that stimulate new avenues of creativity.
That’s exciting.
There are many who note that what we have at the moment ought not to be considered genuine “artificial intelligence,” but more networks with a simple nature: very large language models. They’re smart enough to analyze vast bodies of data and recreate unique and clever outputs that seem reasonable and useful, but they’re not yet reasoning nor empathetic nor lateral enough to be anything more that very clever computers.
Of course, it’s early days.
Looking ahead through the mists of time, I wonder. Could Gutenberg have imagined what impact the printing press might have? Could those first clever souls who thought of connecting a couple of computers across campus have imagined the very power that the internet wields over our lives now? Could the person who put an axle through the center of a circular slab of wood have had any vague inkling of the pivotal impact that would have?
I suppose the metaphor of the title of my story—”Bridges”—is in looking for a link between our very human kind of intelligence and the very non-human kind of intelligence that may well be arising around us as we, perhaps, play with fire.
The world has always been changing, from letting wheels free us from dragging stuff through the dirt, to the idea of farming, or the invention of boats. I smile at the thought that cameras went from expensive, huge, delicate things in the hands of a few, to virtually all of us having them in our pockets, filled with more images than we can ever effectively deal with.
Science fiction posits possible futures. Sometimes they might be right. Sometimes way off.
I hope that we can cross our way through this next big change safely, but within that, I hope that I’ve written an entertaining and engaging story.
From Earth to the Stars 