Omnipedia #23: Demis Hassabis loves Iain M. Banks, Kundera gone & Sigur Ros here, war drones in the orchard, & more
Including: Red Enlightenment, auto-modernity swept away, two old post-post-punks talking
Literally torrential this week…. many signs and wonders in this trends-letter. If you like what I’ve gathered, please consider supporting this, via one of the “Upgrade to Paid” options. Go down that lovely slide at the button below:
The NYTimes’s Ezra Klein interviewing (audio and transcript) the head of Google Deep Mind, Demis Hassabis, induces a kind of calm in the current AI storm.
This is not Eliezer Yudkowsky predicting our termination by powerful AI that has evolved dangerous goals (his TEDTalk is just up). This is a fascinating, near-evolutionary link between gameplay and science. Hassabis the computer-games maker (and not mentioned here, the chess grand-master) shares his major realisation: that powerful computers with a reward incentive to win pattern-seeking games become the most incessant learners and experimenters.
This applies to the pursuit of scientific understanding - for example, Deep Mind’s AlphaFold AI trying and trying again, playing against itself, to explore plausible protein folds. It deploys, and then eventually transcends, 40 slow and grinding years of human biological science.
Hassabis want to apply this exploratory system to climate, physics, new materials, hoping to generate new combinations of matter. Elsewhere in this interview, he benignly imagines a linguistically-friendly GPT, dipping into specialised scientific AI of many potent kinds, and being the avuncular mediator between them and us.
And for this newsletter, which is part of a writer’s site bearing the strapline, “The Future (and Scotland too)”, the payoff at the end of the interview was sheer gold. Hassabis was asked for his book recommendations:
And then finally, I would recommend “Consider Phlebas” by Iain M. Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me, and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it’s the best depiction of a post-A.G.I. future, an optimistic post-A.G.I. future, where we’re traveling the stars and humanity reached its full flourishing.
I’ve written a lot about how Iain M. Banks, this late, whisky-loving Scottish socialist, has become a reference point for much of the Northern tech elites (Musk and Bezos notably) by means of his SF novels and their setting in his future civilisation, “The Culture”,And how oddly that sat with their “move fast and break things” libertarianism.
From my 2018 piece in the National, when Amazon Prime was still on schedule to turn Hassabis’ favourite novel into a movie (the family estate withdrew consent just before production), I noted:
Consider Phlebas is emerging into an increasingly crowded SF-TV universe. It’s dominated by Netflix, where you can binge (and I have) on the multi-part universe of Black Mirror, Star Trek or Altered Carbon.
It’s an odd kind of escapism. You lose yourself in worlds where the technological potentials are infinite, but the base emotions, criminal acts and power games seem all too familiar. I emerge from them seeking not more scientific innovation, but more moral, ethical and political innovation.
The adapter of Consider Phlebas, British writer Dennis Kelly, dropped an encouraging quote the other day: “Far from being the dystopian nightmares that we are used to, Banks creates a kind of flawed paradise, a society truly worth fighting for,” said Kelly. “Rather than a warning from the future, his books are a beckoning.”
I get a vibe from Hassabis - particularly those parts of the interview above, where he audibly shudders at the idea that his learning and exploring machines might be deployed to “win the game” of a capitalist stock-market - that he’s much more in Banks’s groove than his Californian peers. This rollicking 2013 Atlantic interview with Banks - ambitious, wry, politically explicit, and optimistic about AI - shows why we all miss him. Writer, and science-ludocrat, alike.
Happy apple-picking by lovely drones in fulsome orchards:
The above is not dissimilar to the Chobani solar-punk ad (below is the ‘decommodified’ version, here is the commercial original):
But it’s the old journo in me that tracks the company behind these apple-picking drones, Tevel Aerobotics, to their military-industrial locus. Of course, they are here alongside many other maleficents (including, a little terrifyingly, Proctor & Gamble). Swords into ploughshares into swords into ploughshares into—🔂
Seems to be a week for a/v montages… I couldn’t put my finger on what this eco-apocalyptic scene from Zaragosa, north-east Spain, 7th July, reminded me of (the black framing around the phone clips seems appropriate):
Then I did. Jean-Luc Godard’s destruction of auto-modernity in Weekend is now considerably tamer than Gaia’s:
The layers of glacial orchestral chords, mixed with Sigur Ros’s tremulous singing, had me sobbing backstage at my Hue And Cry “Let’s Rock” “legacy” gig in Southhampton. It may just have been an otherwise vulnerable moment, but I hope it does the same for you too.
Does the sputtering Twittering Machine deserve my x-risk outpourings (accompanied by visits to Midjourney to customise images) anymore? Given that I can’t link to them, or display them here in an open-web way, I will screengrab my thumbings resentfully. But my inclusion of “atom bomb mushroom cloud" in the Midjourney prompt probably bumped me up the lists, according to those fetid Muskian algorithms. Like I care. I want this.
I had missed this in-depth interview I did with an old creative-economy friend, Jeremy Brown of Sense Network, maybe nearly a year ago now. Lots of talk about: play, post-post-punk, AI and the Metaverse (then hot).
More horns to honk
📕It’s rare to know you’ll be reading and re-reading a book many times - but Red Enlightenment: On Socialism, Science and Spirituality by Graham Jones is doing this for me. Amidst exquisite and learned musings on how left materialists might open up a conversation with others about transcendence, and the great questions within spiritual traditions, there is a tragic pulse. Jones’ father died during a Covid bout, which the son survived, and is left with the perennial agonies this opens up. A brilliant and dignified enterprise. Highly recommended.
🫀🤖Regular readers will know I’m waiting for some ground-shaking announcement about the creation of artificial consciousness (one that feels and wants - not just an intellect) coming from the neuro-psychoanalyst Mark Solms’ labs. Meanwhile (maybe never?), Mark approves of this Quillette review of his masterwork the Hidden Spring, out of whose workings the announcement will, as it were, spring.
👹 Sorry sorry, but the ecological hit is coming. And coming again.
Ok, reversing at speed out of this one… If you enjoy this kind of work, I would love for you to help me do it, by considering one of the “Upgrade to Paid” options, available from the button below. Much love, keep the heid people, best PK xxx