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 Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more