Skip to main content

Age of Extinction (SF) - Mark Gomes ****

I'm giving this dive into a dystopian AI-dominated future four stars despite some significant flaws because I enjoyed it. Mark Gomes likens the impact of AI on humanity over the next few years to one of the palaeological mass extinctions, though in this case potentially destroying a single species - us. Set in the present and near future, we see the AI-driven technology of billionaire Nolan Scent (a musky scent, I suspect) beginning to take away the majority of jobs that aren't manual labour, service industry or working on new technology.

This is bad enough in itself and certainly has potential parallels in the real world (though Gomes' timescales are wildly over-exaggerated, as you can't, for instance, set up AI-automated factories to do all manufacturing in a couple of years). But Scent also has a chip that, when implanted in the brain, leaves workers contented with their lot - so, for example, people previously doing skilled jobs are happy becoming cleaners.

The protagonists other than Scent himself are his daughter Molly, who helps him but has concerns about what's happening, an outspoken professor who is struggling to get the world to accept that the AI future dooms everyone except the tech bros, and a brilliant researcher, Ethan, who has taken the technology to the next level using a quantum computer, enabling him to give his locked-in brother the ability to interact with the outside world.

The book's structure of pseudo-factual reporting, then a personal story, then the main storyline for each of seven sections gets in the way of feeling any real engagement with the storyline and characters for the first few chapters, but once we get more of Molly and Ethan, the writing becomes more effective and I genuinely wanted to find out what happened next. The ending is, frankly, weird - but doesn't ruin the book.

I do need to mention those flaws, though. The page layout is terrible - there is no indentation of paragraphs, for example, making dialogue difficult to read. Anyone who has looked at a professionally produced book to see how it's done should have noticed this. The book could also do with an edit - for example there are changes of tense mid-paragraph, and some inconsistency - on page 58, for instance, we read 'Molly's confidence faltered...' then on page 60, later in the same scene, 'For the first time that evening, her confidence wavered.' And the dates in the 'factual reporting' sections need a serious revision with, for example, a report from 2024 being about something happening several years later.

Leaving aside the ending, there are also some issues with the technology portrayed. It's a bit unfortunate that this book has come out just as people are realising how much generative AI makes things up, probably slowing down AI takeover considerably. And the imagined neural chips have real problems: there is no evidence people would undergo brain surgery to get a job, and the chips are far too capable (not only controlling emotions, but apparently able to fix a congenital heart defect). There's also no explanation of how the economy would work - apparently most of the population would become really poor, but by cutting out the middle class, Scent would be destroying the mass market for his sales.

Despite these issues, I mostly enjoyed the ride, and it is a useful reminder of how AI and robotics have the potential to make a major impact on everyday lives.

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 or taking out a membership:
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

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more