Greetings Picklesversians,
The Ides of January are upon us!
Yes, it’s the 13th of the month already, time is racing faster than Pheidippides bringing word of Athenian victory at the Battle of Marathon (or Thersippos or Eukles or whoever it actually was), and as this isn’t March, May, July or October, when the Ides fall on the 15th, you’re hearing from me again. To paraphrase Plutarch: Rejoice! You have won!
But enough references to classical antiquity… it’s 2024, for Pete’s sake!
2024… If that’s not a futuristic-sounding date, I don’t know what is. Then again, as far as I’m concerned, any date after the year 2000 summons mental images of hoverboards and moon bases and robots taking our jobs.
That last point is topical, though. If you’ve read Beware the Ides of April you’ll have met Ben. He’s the Artificial Intelligence created by ArkTech, the company famous for ending the climate crisis. (If you’d like to know how ArkTech did that, you can find out in later instalments of the series… no spoilers here.)
Artificial Intelligence has been a particularly hot topic since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. A lot of the coverage has ranged from troubling to sinister. There are people in Kenya who’ve been paid a pittance to spend all day reading graphic content with a view to training large language models (LLMs), which has understandably had a massively negative impact on their mental health. And authors and newspapers alike have been suing OpenAI, asserting that their published works have been used to train LLMs without proper attention being paid to copyright law.
Ben would not approve.
And then, on the other side, education providers like Duolingo are launching new products that integrate LLMs into their materials to offer a more personalised learning experience. And there’s generally a lot of buzz about how AI can enhance productivity for businesses, which… I guess is something we’re supposed to care about? More profit = yay? <waves a tiny flag>
But I read something recently with a deeper and more existential take on the role of AI. I stumbled on it through a series of bizarre accidents while writing the novella I mentioned in my last communiqué. (Not the kind of bizarre accident where my toe gets caught in my own pyjama leg and I hurtle across the living room… imagine something similar to that, but a more intellectual equivalent.)
The book I read was called Novacene by James Lovelock. It was published in 2019, to coincide with the author’s 100th birthday (now that really is amazing)! The title is a reference to geological epochs…
For background, our current epoch is known as the Holocene. (‘Holocene’ comes from the ancient Greek words for ‘whole’ and ‘new’… those classical types get everywhere, don’t they?) We’ve been in the Holocene since 11,700 years ago (give or take) and it marks the period when humanity really got stuck into that whole productivity thing. (Yay! <waves tiny flag>) Once that last ice age wrapped up, we did ALL THE THINGS! From harnessing fire for cooking, to agriculture, to laser quest. It all happened during the Holocene.
However, there are those who argue that we’ve now passed into a new epoch, termed the Anthropocene. This term, from the ancient Greek (them again) words for ‘human’ and ‘new’, suggests a period during which humanity has had large-scale and long-term impacts on the Earth including, but not limited to, deforestation, species destruction, and climate change.
In his book, James Lovelock proposes the coming of an epoch that will supplant the Anthropocene. As a placeholder, he calls it the Novacene, from both the Latin and ancient Greek words for ‘new’. This ‘New New’ epoch will be characterised by the arrival of synthetic hyperintelligence, which he calls ‘cyborgs’. Lovelock views this as a positive development, positing a future in which humanity’s dominant role as the sole lifeforms capable of contemplating the cosmos comes to an end. That role is supplanted by our artificially intelligent descendants, making AI the next step in our planet’s (and indeed our universe’s) evolutionary journey.
This might bring to your minds images from The Matrix (if you haven’t seen The Matrix, go and watch The Matrix immediately). Creepy robots farming humans for energy under a blackened sky (spoiler alert! But, it’s from 1999, so if you haven’t seen it by now, you clearly haven’t been making productive use of your time). But Lovelock’s framing of the future is as resoundingly optimistic as it is persuasive. Essentially, we pass into an age when beings use energy to create information (as opposed to food), and the continuance of that information is not dependent on the survival of squishy ape-creatures, or the planet they live on. I recommend checking out Lovelock’s book (after you’ve watched The Matrix).
I’ll leave you with that bombshell.
Oh, but I do have one final note for today on the topic of AI…
Last month, you may have noticed my hilarious joke about Romans writing #TempusFugit on the walls of their Forum. This inspired a Picklesversian to send me an AI-generated image of that scene, complete with Christmas theming. It was excessively delightful. She also suggested that the inclusion of AI generated images would be on brand for these emails. So, in her honour, I provide one below.
To set the scene, I should explain that the photograph at the top of this email comes from my recent visit to the south of Spain, in which I captured and brought back concrete proof that the sun does still exist despite there being no evidence of that fact in the UK. The images below are from the same trip.
- One of them is a perfect writing spot I found.
- One of them is a photo of me with the sun.
- And one of them is an AI-generated impression of me with the sun.
It’s up to you to figure out which is which.
Until the Ides of February,
Marianne
P.S. I haven’t broached the topic of new year’s resolutions. In case you’re interested, mine is to bring back the word ‘communiqué’.
