How to Build A.I. We Can Relate to
Writers are the key to creating a frictionless future worth having
My dog loves to play with his toy snake by repeatedly breaking its neck. He prefers traveling on the top of London buses so he can see what’s happening in the world, and he obsessively checks pee-mails and sex-messages from other dogs as we walk around the neighborhood.
His seriousness about all these deeply silly things makes me imagine how a superior intelligence might patronize pet humans, keeping us entertained in a captivity we were barely even aware of while chuckling at our antics.
There are three main ways we imagine encountering a truly novel intelligence: another known species in a different genus or kingdom (dolphin, octopus); alien intelligence; or native, sentient artificial intelligence. And while we worry and invent nightmares about killer machines, predatory aliens, and creatures turning on humans, we also dream of bridging the cosmic loneliness as the only entities we know of who can hold a proper conversation. “No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved,” but in some of our imaginings, A.I. can and does see us and hold us in mind in the precise ways we crave but can never satisfy.
Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age is set in a nanotechnology future…
