In "The Rise of the Robots," Martin Ford argues that even the well-educated will soon face a jobless future as a result of increasingly sophisticated technology. Meanwhile, Craig Lambert, in "Shadow Work," notes that there will still be plenty of work that needs to be done -- much of it rather menial because, well, humans will still be humans. But no one will pay for it.
I mention these books not for their own sake, but rather because the NYT review reminded me that one of the roles of fiction is to look into the future.
The most famous book of that nature is probably George Orwell's novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four," published in 1940. With commendable foresight, Orwell depicted a world of perpetual warfare and a surveillance society where independent thinking is a crime and history is being constantly rewritten.
Another prominent example is Cormac McCarthy's 2006 post-apocalyptic novel "The Road" where civilization and all that supports it has been destroyed and most of what is left of humanity survives in lawless, cannibalistic gangs.
Fans of this genre looking for a short, well-written and exceptionally au courant tale should take a look at "This is an Alert," a story by Thomas Pierce in the March 30, 2015, issue of "The New Yorker." In it, a family attempts to carry on normal life while a drone war rages above, mostly out of sight, and gas masks are to be donned at every alert.
Somewhere up there, above the clouds, in the high hazy blue-black atmosphere, the war is being fought, always—by swarms of Snakes (the long skinny drones that drop bombs) and Jailbirds (the ones that carry germs and gases) and of course Sweepers and Guardian-Zs (which keep the bombs and germs and gases from reaching us) and all the other drones and micro-drones and nano-drones the cable news hasn’t come up with fun names for yet.
Which nations are at war? No one knows anymore.
“None of them are ours, per se. Not anymore," Cecil [one character in the story] said emphatically, scratching his chest hair. "We lost control of them months ago. They’re A.I.—artificial intelligence. They’ve evolved to the point where they no longer need us. They’re operating on their own now. They’ve got their own agenda."
Drones -- the one that crashed on the White House lawn; the one that landed on the top of the Japanese prime minister's office, carrying a bottle marked with the radiation symbol, the myriad drones now serving as America's front-line forces against terrorism in the Middle East. How long before drones are someone else's front-line forces against us?
Cellphones, now ubiquitous. In "This is an Alert," that's the way everyone is warned of danger, their phones flashing red as they sound a warning. Stop everything, including your car. Get that gas mask on.
Artificial Intelligence: technology increasingly operating independent of human intervention -- Martin Ford's prediction of a jobless future.
But curiously, humanity itself is little changed, and that makes Pierce's piece in "The New Yorker" particularly compelling reading. We can see ourselves, worrying about our makeup, worrying about being late, uncomfortable with perspiration, eating mac-and-cheese casseroles. Personal issues, testy relationships, questionable behavior are just as preoccupying as what is going on overhead.
It's a tale well worth reading -- and one you won't soon forget.
And a Follow-up Piece
Today, July 29, 2015, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a London-datelined Associated Press report in which a number of prominent science and technology experts warned against the development and deployment of autonomous weapons – weapons controlled by artificial intelligence (AI).
The reason I am writing about this turn of events is because it is closely related to an earlier posting of mine entitled “Fiction of the Future,” which you can read by clicking on those words. In it, I recommended a short story entitled “This is an Alert” by Thomas Pierce that was published in the March 30, 2015, edition of the New Yorker magazine. The story presents one vision about what a conflict with AI-controlled weapons might look like.
The warning upon which the AP reported took the form of an open letter the news agency said was signed not just by scientific and technical experts such as Professor Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, but also by philosophers, historians, sociologists and geneticists.
While some have argued that robots and drones can save the lives of combatants, the letter said that once AI-controlled weapons are developed, they will require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, making them easy to produce – unlike nuclear weapons.
“It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetuate ethnic cleansing, etc,” the letter said. The experts believe they should be banned, like chemical weapons.
Among other things, the warning is a reason to read “This is an Alert” if you haven't done so already.
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