The parallels between Alex Garland’sDevsand Tom Stoppard’sArcadia.
Prompted by his time atClearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet,Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence…and what stories are missing.
And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago:What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?
If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.
A thought-provoking first watch of Blade Runner…with an equally provocative interpretation inthe comments:
The tragedy is not that they’re just like people and they’re being hunted down; that’s way too simplistic a reading. The tragedy is that they have been deliberately built tonotbe just like people, and they want to be and don’t know how.
That’s what really struck me about Kazuo Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Go:the tragedy is that these peoplecan’ttake action. “Run! Leave! Go!” you want to scream at them, but you might as well tell someone “Fly! Why don’t you just fly?”
A spoiler-filled look at the new Christopher Nolan film.