Ken Liu - Good Spells (The Book of Witches, 2023)

 

Jutt, kus nõiandus on küll kenasti olemas, aga seda lähituleviku tingimustes - kus elu on suuresti tehisintellekti juhtida, kus inimestel pole seetõttu enam võimalik tungida tehnoloogia südameni, kuna see on niivõrd tehisintellekti hallatav … ja mitmekordselt ümberkirjutatud.

Liigne sõltumine masinatest viib muidugi üksinduseni. Ja et masinaid võita (või õigemini petta), on võimalik kuidagi kõiksugu “nõidusi” teha, aga peamine siiski: mitte olla kogu aeg ratsionaalne või ratsionaalselt juhitud. Inimene pole inimene vaid üksi olles.

Liu maalib õige tumeda tuleviku (muidugi, sõltuvalt vaatepunktist või ihadest), aga samas paneb ka oma visioonidega hope punki. Noh, miks mitte.

“I gave up my dream when I realized that even programming had become permeated with architecting wizards, codewalking familiars, refactoring pixies, concurrency djinn, multicall completion daemons, distributed intelli-swarms, hidden-layer scrying consoles, attention-visualization crystals. Just as it was no longer possible for most humans to truly understand computer-assisted mathematical proofs, the implementation of modern AI systems had become so complicated that it was literally impossible for any individual human to grasp them, to add to them, to reconstruct them, or even hack them effectively without the aid of machine-learning, of assisting automata that made sense of the layers upon layers of abstractions, extended metaphors, symbolic notations, self-referential ontologies, feedback and feedforward loops.

To program the machine, one needed to place trust in more machines. I couldn’t live like that.” (lk 75)

 

“Was I helping someone in need or just giving an addict more attention? Does it make a difference either way? There’s always an uncertainty in working with humans. They aren’t binary, not even shades of gray. They’re jagged, unpredictable, analog, beautiful as well as despicable, cruel and kind, pitiable and manipulative, all at once.

Even if Zelda was playing me, I can’t see myself doing anything different. A witch is supposed to believe the best of her clients - that’s part of the magic.” (lk 86)

 

“This is why we’re surrounded by discarded pieces of AI, I realize. The fai are the ghosts of our own arrogance and callousness coming back to haunt us.

I’ve been focused on how humans are being remade to be more like machines, but I haven’t considered the possibility that machines are also being constructed to be more like humans - disposable, powerless, fungible. There’s always a younger one willing to work for less, a newer model ready to take the place of the old. Funny how the logic of efficiency and productivity always leads here.” (lk 90)