Let me tell you a story
“Sizzling Saturn, we’ve got a lunatic robot on our hands.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot
One of the first robot novels ever written was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus from 1818. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a monstrous creature in an unorthodox science experiment, giving it the spark of life. Since the publication of the novel, the name ‘Frankenstein’ has often been used, erroneously, to refer to the monster, rather than to his creator.
Hidden in this Gothic horror novel is a deep human fear for our own creations. Our fear for robots — superintelligent machines that will run amok and turn on their maker — has since become part of our collective memory.
Isaac Asimov, the greatest science fiction writer who has ever lived, once wrote, “today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact”. In his short stories, robots were portrayed radically different, 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. His clairvoyance was extraordinary.
Let me offer you some perspective
It’s clear that the future we once imagined has in fact arrived. By designing AI after 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.
We can’t stop it and progress will not slow down. The only thing we can do is 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.
That’s why we need to educate ourselves. We need human-generated content that sparks curiosity, is investigative, and breaks down these complex topics to a wider audience.
This newsletter is a modest attempt at that.
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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.
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