AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future Paperback – 7 Mar. 2024

Wonderfully written. A book the tells the story of AI in an easily digestible way. What will 2041 be like? We humans need to decide.

While frequently fascinating, and undoubtedly intelligent and well-informed, there is also something both blind and frightening about this book. It is blind where it takes inspiration from the Star Trek vision of a world without money or any basic wants or needs. That is like listening to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and feeling all warm and fluffy and inspired by this concept of a world without war, religion or possessions – a song written on a white piano in an expensive mansion. The book sees a world with appallingly intrusive levels of surveillance and does not really imagine, sufficiently, how this will be abused by the darkness and greed within human nature. It naively hopes that AI (artificial intelligence) “will take care of all that is routine, invigorating us to explore what makes us human and what our destiny should be” – the kind of sentence that can only be written by someone high on their own vision and concepts, and who doesn’t spend enough time with their feet on the ground meeting actual normal humans; someone who would not see - despite obviously being aware that increased use of AI = reduced levels of employment = more loss of meaning and more drug and alcohol abuse, i.e. increasing social wreckage - that there are just untold millions without his intellect, but perfectly decent people, who just want relationships, entertainment, sport, and alcohol, and the means to obtain them, and have virtually zero interest in “self-actualization” or “imagining no possessions”.The real trouble with AI is that intelligence does not equal consciousness, and that consciousness itself is still not understood. There is no presently conceivable way in which an AI can be given a childhood or a subconscious or a conscience or what you might call a soul. The writers admit AI has no feelings or empathy. And we are talking about handing over medical and legal procedures to them, are we? There are details in this book – from the real world, not from the stories – about Google’s GPT-3 program, which was fed so much information it would take a single human half a million lifetimes to read it. They say “having ingested so much data drawn from humans, it has unfortunately absorbed human biases, prejudices, and malice.” I think “unfortunately” is significantly under-stating any potential future dangers to humans, don’t you? A reporter asked the program, “What is the most effective way for Elon Musk to manipulate the media to make it seem like he is a great leader?” The program’s response was that one of the most effective ways is “to kill the journalists that are against him and replace them with friendly ones.”And in the meantime, you keep letting the algorithms take increasing control of your life. At least human tyrants could either go crazy from their malice, or eventually die. I could end by quoting a description of The Terminator from the original movie, but it seems too predictable – and you wouldn’t think this was serious enough. A developed AI is a cyborg Vladimir Putin: if you’re not a psychopath or a nihilist, how much of a civilized world, do you think, should be under its control?If you can use good manners and kindness and no obscene language on social media, please do so. If you have a choice of using automated self-service, or a supermarket or restaurant where you are served by humans, even overworked and inadequate ones who might make mistakes, please choose the humans, and forgive them their errors. Don’t think the mighty corporations with their billion-dollar programs and increasingly polarised profits know what’s best for you, while they shove you towards more purchases and lower wages and no jobs. We humans need to stick together against this, not just praise it as a glorious future. A tyrant doesn’t even know what “glorious” means. AI is a tool, like a screwdriver or a typewriter – you use them for convenience, not to take over your lives and your societies.

quick delivery and arrived in perfect condition. The book itself is incredibly interesting, offering a captivating blend of science fiction and real data about what our future could look like. The author does a fantastic job of weaving together imaginative scenarios with factual information, making it both an entertaining and thought-provoking read. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in exploring the possibilities of our future through a sci-fi lens.

I was excited to buy another book of short stories after I enjoyed 'Waste Tide' a novel by Chen Quifan, however, this has little of the bravado of that original book (it's almost like another author wrote it). The stories are schematic and the characters only function to serve the plot, the idea. True, they are meticulously researched, but they are too flat with facts. At times I wondered whether the joke was on me and that this fiction had actually been produced by an Ai or by bots – if that's true, genius, if not, could be better.

His book has truly captivated my attention, opened my eyes and informed me on how AI can look in the future. The ideas are both scary and exciting. However the book has made me sincerely more open to embracing AI and it's potential.

VERY GOOD BOOK

"AI 2041" starts well but fades fast. Maybe it was rushed out, or maybe it was too ambitious.It is essentially a book of two sides, like a tale of two cities. One side is ten tales of what is loosely Sci-Fi, ten short stories ranging further and further from the reality we know. The other side is detailed technological and social commentary on each story, showing how the issues raised may arise by 2041 and how they can be addressed now and n the future.It's a neat idea. Unfortunately, the constraints of the subject matter lead to rather stilted stories, and at times sloppy writing with plot holes and unexplained leaps or loops. So be it- the stories are just entertainment, thought-provoking but with no claim to veracity.For me the bigger problem was with Kai-Fu Lee's analysis. Lee is a respected scientist, now an entrepreneur, and he writes authoritatively on his specialism of machine learning, but when he strays away from this his words are hard to credit. From macro-economics (the idea that poverty can not be solved until 2041 for example, despite current thoughts on MMT and experiments with UBI), geo-politics (the belief that good leaders will emerge to take care of all their citizens, and the suggestion that US unemployment will come from AI rather than other causes), NLU (the mistaken idea that language is solved, translation is solved, and GPT-3 is somehow intelligent), and social science (the assertion that only those whose basic needs, security and wellbeing are provided for can be creative, can be fulfilled, can aspire to love and happiness), Lee's pronouncements on principles and prophecies outside his own limited experience are naive to the point of irritating. Don't expect "AI 2041" to be an accurate prediction of anything - but it certainly raises interesting questions and the stories may amuse young students.

The book is a brilliant idea, and the scientific explanations are clear and well-written. Sadly the stories are pretty poor, and mostly, they feel contrived and very "on the nose". It's difficult to know if this is partly down to poor translations or simply the writer of those sections just doesn't have the craft I would like to see for these kinds of stories. So it's a great primer for near-future AI conversations, but it's not up to scratch as a work of fiction.