Once again, the AI people are letting a work of fiction seep into their brains. This time it is a piece of speculative fiction for Europeans called “Europe 2031.” Before that, it was the company of Citrini Research “The global intelligence crisis of 2028” a story about administrative unemployment that caused stocks to fall. Before that, it was AI 2027 in which a super-intelligent AI kills humanity. The sitting vice president of the United States. He says he read that.
Europe 2031 was written by eight people referring to themselves as “a small group of AI researchers, experts and investors who have spent their careers at the intersection of frontier AI and European politics.”
The power these documents have is not good for the world. I have some authority on this topic, a very small amount, because I wrote a hypothetical scenario book and managed to publish it in several countries.
Speculative writing begins with some apocalyptic ending and then the writer works backwards. This is because fiction is a trap. You throw away reality and only write down the steps necessary to get to your destination. You can be completely sincere about what you are doing, but Readers will still think you are predicting the future..
I told my readers not to base their decisions on what I wrote, and that playing with things is just a habit of mind that helps me manage my own anxiety, but people who read my hypotheses still tell me I scared them. Worse: They ask me for advice.
My lesson is that the written word is the best means of scaring people, and that ideas that scare people are sticky.
So, with that in mind, what scares people now is a piece of speculative fiction about Europe not taking AI independence seriously enough. It begins as all good cheesy sci-fi should, with the kind of show-don’t-tell introduction they teach you in college writing seminars:
Caroline splashes cold water on her face and looks in the bathroom mirror. His hands are shaking. He grabs the edge of the sink and waits for it to pass. Through the small high window he can see a patch of the Washington sky, flat and bright.
Oh God, what’s going to happen to poor Caroline? Answer: She fails to convince Europe to act in time and ends up bitter, disillusioned, and financially dependent on a billionaire friend after quitting her job. Oh, and his mom dies.
Zooming out, Europe is defenseless as AI-powered hackers make mincemeat of its outdated safeguards. The European economy and probably the EU itself face almost certain death after the continent is left out of the AI race. He two big bullies, the United States and China, hold all the cards.
“Even in 2026, the continent could still have changed course if it had shown the courage and political will to take drastic measures,” the authors write towards the end of Europe 2031.
According to the guardianThe story has fueled “a feverish discussion about the urgency of EU technological sovereignty” amid the G7 talks. Members of the European Parliament have read it and unofficial diplomatic talks between the UK and Germany have been based on it. That’s terrifying.
My take on speculative stories is that they are lies that can nevertheless clear the brain fog, especially if the proposed situation is one that people are already talking about without much thought about what it would take to get there. But much better writers than me have regretted some of their speculation. For example, Kim Stanley Robinson is said to have felt remorse after appearing to endorse cryptocurrencies as part of a solution to climate change in his book. Ministry for the future.
Fascinating talk from Kim Stanley Robinson aft @Stanford. He says he regrets mentioning bitcoin/crypto in Ministry for the Future (he calls it a fraudulent scam) and talked about how we are in a very different feeling structure about the polycrisis now than when he wrote it in 2019. pic.twitter.com/fcw6zZCa7E
– Britt Wray, PhD (@brittwray) June 5, 2022
So remember, kids: stories are first and foremost lies and should always be treated as such.
