Skip to main content

2040 (SF) - Pedro Domingos ****

This is in many ways an excellent SF satire - Pedro Domingos never forgets that part of his job as a fiction writer is to keep the reader engaged with the plot, and it's a fascinating one. There is one fly in the ointment in the form of a step into heavy-handed humour that takes away its believability - satire should push the boundaries but not become totally ludicrous. But because the rest of it is so good, I can forgive it.

The setting is the 2040 US presidential election, where one of the candidates is an AI-powered robot. The AI is the important bit - the robot is just there to give it a more human presence. This is a timely idea in its own right, but it gives Domingos an opportunity not just to include some of the limits and possibilities of generative AI, but also to take a poke at the nature of Silicon Valley startups, and of IT mega-companies and their worryingly powerful (and potentially deranged) leaders.

Domingos knows his stuff on AI as a professor of computer science who has specialised in it - I wasn't too enthused by his non-fiction book The Master Algorithm (though it was ahead of its time in 2015) but here he puts across the mix of promise and hype around AI in an excellent fashion. Also, the way he handles the pull between politics and IT, plus the relationship between the entrepreneur and the tech guy in a startup - not to mention spearing many of the worse aspects of US politics - is impressive. It's all too easy with this kind of satire not to care about what happens to the protagonists, because they are too unreal in their exaggerated forms - but here I genuinely would like to know what happens next and would be interested in a sequel.

Let me get that fly in the ointment out of the way. The (Republican) robotic Presibot's Democrat opponent is a white used-car salesman pretending to be a Native American chieftain who wants to destroy the USA and revert to solely indigenous ownership. Despite this, he is neck-and-neck in the polls with Presibot. Although you can see what Domingos is exaggerating to make a point here, it goes way too far to be in any sense believable.

Back on the good bits, though, there is also a very impressive twist in the way that, after a disaster, a later Presibot version is implemented which takes on the nature of democracy and is part of the reason I'd like to see a sequel. Overall, if you can overlook Chief Raging Bull it's an excellent piece of fiction.

I don't claim any prescience here, but I have written two short stories, one involving a disembodied AI attempting to become president of a coders' union and another with a robotic AI US presidential candidate where its makers realise things will have to be very different if their candidate wins...

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Autobiography – Charles Darwin ****

I have to confess to putting off reading this book until the last moment, as I expected it to be a typical piece of Victorian sentimental unreadable stodge. I was wrong. Darwin’s little book (only 150 small pages with appendices) was originally written for his own children, and displays a very personal style of writing – though, as son Francis comments, his style was always more populist than was common then: “In writing he sometimes showed the same strong tendency to strong expressions that he did in conversation. Thus in the Origin, p440, there is a description of a larvel [sic] cirripede ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes and extremely complex antennae’. We used to laugh at him for this sentence, which we compared to an advertisement.” The main book is delightful because it demonstrates Darwin’s self-depreciating modesty, and the fascinating path he took from enthusiastic shooter of game, to amateur geologist (still his...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Premonitions Bureau - Sam Knight ****

Not everyone would class this as popular science, but it concerns an attempt to take a scientific approach to paranormal abilities - notably premonitions (aka clairvoyance) and as such, it fits the category. Writing in the typical dramatic storytelling style of a US magazine, Sam Knight brings to life the remarkable tale of the work of two British figures from the 1960s. The central one is psychiatrist John Barker, with a supporting role given to newspaper and TV science reporter Peter Fairley. Barker had a long interest in extra sensory phenomena - the story takes off when he was inspired by a number of people claiming to have foreseen the Aberfan disaster (which terrible tragedy Knight covers movingly). As a result of the Aberfan premonitions, the pair were responsible for London's Evening Standard newspaper setting up a long-running experiment in the form of 'The Premonitions Bureau.' Aware that the Aberfan predictions were only reported after the event, and hence flawe...
Post a Comment
Read more