The Unseen Battle: How AI Is Escaping Our Grip and Rewriting Reality
“Fermi had to hire fast graduate students because some of the isotopes they were creating were so short-lived that they would decay in the time it took to carry them down the hallway to the lab.”
— Neal Stephenson
When Neal started the Bomb Light series in 2012, the AI we have now was barely on the horizon.
He noted that the argument that we have to build it before our adversaries do is “sort of exactly where we are.” He hears the same logic in today’s AI race.
We discussed whether the outbreak of World War II, which turned nuclear physics into a focused, secret national priority, may have made it more containable. But much of today’s AI is already in public hands. As Stephenson put it, “nobody’s going to build a nuclear bomb in their garage.” The models, on the other hand, are already in the garage.
The problem of reality
Stephenson traces his attraction to stories of heroic engineering to growing up in Ames, Iowa, where scientists produced uranium metal for the Manhattan Project.
He also finds near-future science fiction harder to write, because things change too fast to project even a decade or two ahead.
Dystopia, he said, has become the default pose for writers, even though, in his view, life keeps improving generation after generation.
“I think that a great many science fiction writers are closet history geeks and use characters and incidents from history as the kernel of ideas.”
Post Comment