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

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more