In her Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford at Microsoft Research blows the whistle on a field that, for all its millennial promise, treats information as just another extractive industry, so that we slide ever further towards undemocratic governance and increased inequality.įor a positive vision of the intellect set free, turn to Italian theoretical physicist and bestselling author Carlo Rovelli. It is a paradigm that, for all its rigour, re-enchants the world and enriches our place in it.Īlas, a lot of recent thinking has been leading us in the opposite direction. Marletto’s contributions to “constructor theory” reconcile what we think of as physical laws with the open-ended possibilities thrown up by biology and information theory. Seth encourages us to view ourselves as less apart from the rest of nature. There are a number of threads here, from University of Oxford theoretical physicist Chiara Marletto’s revolutionary recasting of physics, The Science of Can and Can’t, to neuroscientist Anil Seth’s new theory of consciousness, Being You: The inside story of your inner universe. The year 2021 also promises to be the year in which we begin to reframe our place in the world, treating it as a system to be explored, rather than as an object to be exploited. We need to educate ourselves if we are to keep our governments, our employers and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. There are fortunes to be made in the new economy, but only if the right incentives are in place – and these incentives will need political backing if they are to succeed. There is a balance to be struck here, and Bill Gates’s How to Avoid a Climate Disaster finds it. “AI research treats information as an extractive industry, taking us towards increased inequality” Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert points out that many of our interventions in nature have been devastating and asks if it is too late for us to turn it around. Fair enough, although as Michael Mann argues in The New Climate War: The fight to take back our planet, we should be suspicious of attempts to push responsibility for change onto citizens and away from the industries that are damaging our planet the most.
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