Aiee, AI! Or, feeling the story

With the publication of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age fast approaching but not yet arrived, I’m at that awkward stage in an author’s journey with a book where it’s too late to change anything in it, but it’s not yet left the nest and made its own way in the world. Already, I’m visited too often by an internal monologue along the lines of “should have included that, shouldn’t have said that, should have said that better”. Something I like about writing books rather than, say, blog posts is their fixed and tangible material presence in the world. The downside is, well, the fixity, rather than the more dialogic nature of online discussion. At its best – which it often is on this blog – online dialogue can be great. Whereas at its worst, retreating to a book and its ineradicable one-way word flow offers a certain balm to the soul.

Ah well, I’m happy overall with what I’ve written in Finding Lights. But in this awkward moment of pause, I still sometimes find myself switching gears in conversations with people when they stray into potentially controversial areas in case it prompts a flaring of that internal monologue. One such area that’s blindsided me a couple of times has been along the lines of “Ah, so you’re writing about the shape of the future – I expect you must have said a lot about artificial intelligence? It’s going to change the world!”

The truth, dear reader, is that I’ve said almost nothing about artificial intelligence in the book. And so the internal monologue flares again: “Aiee, AI! Should have included that…”

An advance review copy of the book sits on the desk beside me as I write these words. I touch it and feel its calming fixity. What’s done is done, and you can’t write about everything in the few short pages of a book…

Actually, I’m fairly relaxed about my AI omission. I see AI as but another over-hyped manifestation of our over-energised and over-connected world, which will likely fall as that world falls. Will it change the world in the meantime? Possibly, but not, I think, in especially interesting or positive ways. If it changes the world, it will change it in the way that the spread of 200 horsepower tractors in a world of 20 horsepower ones changes it. An acceleration, an ...