Books, whether they’re historical, fantastical or fictional, are always the greatest teachers.
Take AI. In the very first pages of Dune, written in 1957, Frank Herbert was delivering this portentous warning:
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them”.
The century’s greatest thinkers, from Orwell to Huxley, gave us the gift of story to highlight potential risks. From the dystopia of Brave New World to the authoritarianism of Big Brother in 1984, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Yet, still, here we are. The ‘great AI revolution’ already guides our every move on the internet via algorithms, which, let’s face it, rule the world. An algorithm somewhere determines what we read, what we don’t. What we wear, what we don’t. Who we date, who we don’t.