Why subscribe?
“Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
Isaac Asimov, possibly one of the greatest science fiction writers who have ever lived, once wrote: “Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact”.
In his short stories, he would portray robots very differently from the writers that came before him, antithetical to the longstanding sci-fi trope of AI turning into an evil mastermind wanting to destroy humanity. The robots in Asimov’s universe were much more innocent and human-like — fallible, imperfect, and idiosyncratic.
I always loved these stories when I was young. Now that I’m older, I love them even more, because his clairvoyance was extraordinary. To me, it’s clear that the future Asimov once imagined has in fact arrived. By designing AI in our own image, trained on everything that is human, it’s becoming more like us. And as it becomes more like us, we struggle to tell the difference.
It forces us to gain a better understanding of the artificial and, in the process, learn more about ourselves. If we fail to do so, and we might, I envision a particularly dark dystopia: a world in which we don’t know what’s real and artificial anymore, where somewhere along the way we have forgotten what it means to be human. It is for this reason we need to educate ourselves. We need human-generated content that sparks curiosity, is investigative, and explores what is coming next.
This newsletter is a modest attempt at that.
About the author
Jurgen Gravestein was employee no. 1 at Conversation Design Institute and now works for the professional services branch of the company. Together with his colleagues, he has trained more than 100+ conversational AI teams globally. He has been teaching computers how to talk since 2018.
Feel free to reach out with a podcast, guest lecture or publication request.
