We understand the world around us through stories. If we want to understand what Artificial Intelligence (AI) means to us as a society, literature is a good place to start. Most commentators are looking at science fiction to help us understand the new reality. For me, there is fundamentally no doubt that this world seems “different” than the world before. It feels like I am in a dream/nightmare where I am unable to comprehend the technology that I am seeing, and feels like I am waiting for someone to wake me up.
Books written by Iain Banks (Culture Series) come closest to what the world might end up with, with the creation of AI. The books describe a universe where machines are so powerful that there is so much material surplus, and no need for any work or trade. The interstellar civilisation is run by machines and they call themselves “Culture”, the AI itself is called “Minds”. Culture is kind and benevolent and moral and takes care of its human subjects, who get whatever they want. But for the humans, there is nothing that seems worth doing any more - they are hedonistic. Iain Banks paints a simultaneous utopian and dystopian universe, where the Culture is slowly taking over other civilisations to make them less violent and kinder. It is a masterpiece with readable, simple prose, and hard-to-comprehend, complex, non-linear plots.
The genre I relate to most in this phase, apart from science fiction, is magical fantasy. I am assuming most of you have read Harry Potter where the wizards are able to do magical things by just saying a spell. For true fans of the genre, the Potterverse seems deceptively simple. All you need to say are the magic words - “Avada Kedavra” and a lightning erupts from the wand and kills someone. There does not seem to be too much practice to this, other than trying to concentrate on the act and saying the words. Other writers have created much more complex magical systems where learning the spell is not that easy.
One of the oldest ideas of magical spells is the idea of the “true name” that has been part of folklore for ages. Ursula K. Le Guin - the writer of the Wizard of Earthsea (on whose premise Harry Potter has been loosely based) has this system. The idea is that everything in the universe has a true name that is hidden in plain reality. Every object has a given name, but that is not the “true name”. Knowing the “true name” of the object is what gives you power over it. For example, my given name is “Rushabh”, but that may not be my true name. My true name is something I will not tell anyone, because if tell it, then they will know exactly how to manipulate me. Another example I like to give is how we name emotions. Emotions come in a range, but when we give them a name, like “anger”, then we can control them.
So in the Earthsea universe, wizards have to toil hard to know the true name of everything if they want to control it. If you want to magically row a boat, you need to know the true name of the boat, and not everyone knows that. In a way, the true name is a proxy for knowledge, a true wizard is someone who is knowledgeable about things around them. And knowledge is the true power of the universe, it is not the magical spell.
This is the analogy I find fascinating in the AI universe. We all suddenly have magical powers, but only few of us will be able to fully use them. These are the people who know the magical spell, the true name, of the thing they want. The prompt is the spell. It will give you what you want, now the harder thing is to know what to want.
In the pre-AI universe, making something was much harder than wanting it, so we were limited by what we could want. There were only a few things we could make. But now we can technically make so many more things, since making is much much easier so the harder thing is to ponder about what to want. Yes you may want to watch a funny reel, or play a game to entertain yourself, or make some money so you can go buy more things, but beyond that what?
What was hard first, has now become easy, and what was easy first has suddenly become hard. This is a spiral, we are back to where we started, but not quite. Once we come to terms with the new reality, we may have to begin a completely different journey. A journey to finding out what we really want. And for that, we may have to go to a wizarding school.
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Dumbledore's office (Warner Bros). Photo credit
