Do algorithms dream of electric sheep?
The increasing interest in, and/or reliance on, tech seems universally acknowledged and as widely debated. Tech is useful or harmful, machines quash or enhance the human element, and link profiling helps or hinders creativity. Small wonder that many people with vested interests in contemporary and literary fiction are all in a tizz over algorithms that can (kind of) predict and (help to) road map a bestseller.
This is nothing new, check out the Hedonometer. Most algorithm buzz -in the book trade and beyond- is not newsworthy, not even sham newsy. Yet this does appear to be a zeitgeist yarn, set to roll on and repeat having already been regurgitated in umpteen places (even my budget-free, and utterly un-ranked, blog in 2016). Talking heads who are paid to fill column inches, whether ink or byte, with comment and conjecture have struck it lucky: a story they can revisit and rinse over time.
Somebody -surely not a machine?- at The Guardian and The Atlantic has chewed it over and churned it back out. There are many others. It all feels like a lot of noise over nothing. And, going by a cursory recce, nobody has posed an obvious literary question: Do algorithms dream of electric sheep?
For me, there is something (albeit not news) here. The algorithm yarn looks like it’s developing from a footnote in history into a chapter of its own — one that develops the age-old tale of human progress from field to factory worker, from machine to skilled robot and beyond. How you read this story and/or how you frame its telling is likely influenced by progress or panic biases that, respectively, inform an upward or downward narrative arc.
Meanwhile a (near?) future sequel to this tale looks entirely more intriguing: the epochal step from amusing/useful algorithm to actual/unbridled Artificial Intelligence.
Some of the best brains on the planet — Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk to name but two — are evidently quite concerned about Artificial Intelligence. Which gives me a recurring pause for thought: is the history of ‘great writing’ a chain of curious, clever, candid minds functioning and revealing insights that help people to make sense of the brain and the human condition? And is that chain about to be broken by algorithms… and someday superseded by AI? Is it in fact timely to ask the silly-sounding question that titles this post?
Perhaps we shall have to wait for the right algorithm/AI to puzzle out these conundrums and other key questions.
