I've been reading The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman. He's not saying it outright, but I'm hearing him say that we're headed for corporate power explicitly replacing nation-states, governing the areas where they operate and protecting only their needs and employees. I really don't want to live in a Cyberpunk world. It's not a good one.
There are a lot of little nit-picky things I could say about the book and how Suleyman seems to contradict himself a lot throughout the book. I think the best thing I can say and remain brief is:
He damns the Luddites for trying to stop the First Industrial Revolution and then turns around and says we now need the things they wanted then to contain AI so it doesn't destroy us.
Leaving aside arguments about whether or not the LLMs are actually AI and how (in)accurate they are, he clearly fears what bad actors could do with AI. Which begs the question of why he was involved in freaking developing one in the first place!
I am left feeling more annoyed at his preaching, both about technophiles and technophobes, than feeling like I learned from the conversation. Also, it probably could have been half the length.
I just finished reading The Turing Option, a SF book written by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky in 1992, but set in what they thought or hoped would be the modern day.
As a piece of propaganda, as a statement of AI theory, as any kind of futurist prediction it fails. As a story, it's not the worst thing I've read, but these days one might call the underlying story YA. It's that immature, or at least naiive. But the romance is between the AI researcher and the technology as they grow together. Any human affections are dead ends.
I've found that many AI stories go the route of AI/human romance. It probably speaks to our fears of being supplanted. I mean, we can expect to be supplanted on an intellectual level at some point if AI ever actually becomes able to infer or create. But romance? That's getting into replacement of humans, you know?
Part of the conceit is that the dude who lost 10 years of his young life's memories, who built the first AI, builds another one after having his brain rebuilt with chips in it, and afterward? His adolescent trauma (which he does remember) makes him into a better friend to his AI than he is to people, and his AI becomes a better human than he is. So it's kinda hacky.
@DejahEntendu@bookstodon Yeah, and the trauma was being betrayed by the girl who gave him his first "adult" experience. Not being shot in the head. So it's just weird.