Supervision and regulation prevent negative effects of AI.
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Science fiction exerts a great influence on technology. Many Silicon Valley visions were anticipated in science fiction. The idea of a metaverse came from the 1992 novel Snow Crash. Elon Musk often quotes the more than 40-year-old fantasy book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In the new book “KI 2041 – Ten Future Visions” the authors turn the tables. The scientist Kai-Fu Lee extrapolates important developments in artificial intelligence 20 years into the future: be it computer vision, speech processing or autonomous driving.
Qiufan Chen translates the ten selected trends into science fiction. The novelist drafts ten short stories, which are processed in a subsequent chapter by Lee from a technological point of view.
The result is surprisingly instructive. Chen fills Lee’s abstract ideas with life and makes them vivid in an entertaining way. In India, young Nayana refuses to let an AI app talk her out of love. A pair of twins in Korea get closer through AI teachers despite different personality traits and life paths.
Kai-Fu Lee is well known to many in the professional world. The expert in artificial intelligence (AI) worked at Microsoft or Apple, was Google’s China boss and has been known to many since his bestseller “AI Superpowers”.
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Kai-Fu Lee, Qiufan Chen: KI 2041. Ten Visions of the Future.
Translation: Thorsten Schmidt
Campus Publisher
Frankfurt 2022
534 pages
26 euros
Lee and Qiufan Chen know each other from Google. Chen worked there until 2017. Then the Chinese resigned to try his hand at being a writer. His novel “The Silicon Island” also aroused interest in Germany. Chen won some literary awards in China, is president of the World Chinese Science Fiction Association.
The duo is a good team. The story “Gods behind masks” tells of deep fakes, “The ghostly idol” of virtual and augmented realities, “The job board” is about people’s fear of losing their jobs through AI. It’s fun to read Lee’s explanations after each story.
This makes complicated technical relationships clearer. In “Gods behind Masks”, for example, the counterfeiter uses so-called “Generative Adversarial Networks” (GAN) to make his manipulated videos better and better. The GAN tennis match makes a lot more sense through the story and explains why soon you won’t be able to believe your eyes when watching videos.
However, the short stories sometimes seem a bit wooden, which may be due to the translation. But it’s much more likely that Lee’s technological specifications are causing Chen’s narrative flow to falter at times.
Then technical processes are explained in detail, which does not always suit the actors, such as the young twins. Also, some connections in the stories are difficult to understand. In “The Golden Elephant”, for example, the behavior of an entire family can be influenced by the level of insurance premiums – which is important for the plot, but hard to believe.
A real strength is the variety of locations in the stories. This may have something to do with the fact that both authors are Chinese and their view of the world is therefore different from ours. They take the reader to Nigeria, Sri Lanka or Iceland, and Chen convincingly succeeds in depicting the culture and circumstances of the respective countries and letting them flow into the story.
What may be unfamiliar to some is Lee and Chen’s optimism. For them, technology and artificial intelligence are a blessing and will change schools and learning fundamentally and beneficially. Negative effects, called “externalities” in the book, are not left out, but the conclusion is almost always positive, in their opinion, regulation and supervision will bring the solution.
One tip at the end: You don’t have to read the stories in one go. Maybe it’s even better to pick a topic to work on. Because otherwise the characters and technologies will quickly become jumbled up, and the figures of technology will seem overburdened. With more than 500 pages, “KI 2041” is a successful reader for the future.
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