"Book Review: '2040' by Pedro Domingos" by Scott Aaronson. That is, the book is by Pedro Domingos and the review is by Scott Aaronson.
"Pedro Domingos is a computer scientist at the University of Washington. I've known him for years as a guy who'd confidently explain to me why I was wrong about everything from physics to CS to politics ... but then, for some reason, ask to meet with me again. Over the past 6 or 7 years, Pedro has become notorious in the CS world as a right-wing bomb-thrower on what I still call Twitter -- one who, fortunately for Pedro, is protected by his tenure at UW. He's also known for a popular book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, which I probably should've read but didn't."
I haven't read that book, either, but as I understand it, the premise of the book is that the AI "master algorithm" will combine neural networks with symbolic AI. So far, we haven't seen any sign that's the way things are going to go. But we have seen neural networks that can solve problems by, for example, instead of trying to do calculations in a language model, using the language model to write Python code and using the Python code to do the actual calculation. There's integration with Wolfram|Alpha that I've tried out and that worked. So it seems to me like the direction things will go is neural networks will do the stuff analogous to the biological neural network known as the human brain, and will use calculating tools, like humans do. You as a human think abstractly about what calculations to do, then use a calculator or write Python code to actually do the calculations accurately, and neural networks will do the same thing. We're already partway down that path, and the future is to make the neural networks more multimodal and have improved context windows and long-term memory and so on. Anyway, getting back to the book review.
"Now Pedro has released a short satirical novel, entitled 2040. The novel centers around a presidential election between:"
"The Democratic candidate, 'Chief Raging Bull,' an angry activist with 1/1024 Native American ancestry (as proven by a DNA test, the Chief proudly boasts) who wants to dissolve the United States and return it to its Native inhabitants, and"
"The Republican candidate, 'PresiBot,' a chatbot with a frequently-malfunctioning robotic 'body.' While this premise would've come off as comic science fiction five years ago, PresiBot now seems like it could plausibly be built using existing LLMs."
"This is all in a near-future whose economy has been transformed (and to some extent hollowed out) by AI, and whose populace is controlled and manipulated by 'Happinet,' a giant San Francisco tech company that parodies Google and/or Meta."
Happinet -- lol.
Ok, so obviously, the idea here is to extrapolate the current political situation and technological situation simultaneously out into the near future (much nearer than 2040, really) and do so in an entertaining and satirical manner. We've already had AI Steve, "Your independent candidate for Brighton Pavilion", so why not PresiBot?
"I should clarify that the protagonists, the ones we're supposed to root for, are the founders of the startup company that built PresiBot -- that is, people who are trying to put the US under the control of a frequently-glitching piece of software that's also a Republican. For some readers, this alone might be a dealbreaker. But as I already knew Pedro's ideological convictions, I felt like I had fair warning."
There are no comments yet.