Stross’s Accelerando (2005), in which what initially seems a light-hearted tale of digital entrepreneurialism turns into a harrowing story of how AIs proceed to dismantle the solar system as raw material for their ever expanding computational, marketized network, eating the universe in a competitive race that casually discards hominids as sub-optimal, under-performing agents. What Accelerando proposes is that, contra the ecstatic visions of Kurzweil and other utopian prophets of the Singularity, the real meaning of such an event is likely to be that ‘The destiny of intelligent tool using life [i]s to be a stepping stone in the evolution of corporate instruments’ (Stross 2005: 240; see Shaviro 2009). A somewhat similar recent vision comes from computer scientist and AI researcher Zachary Mason (who has worked on Amazon’s ML-powered recommendation systems) (Locke 2017). In his Void Star (2017) protagonists in a San Francisco beset by inequality and climate change find their personal lives effectively subsumed and assimilated by the activities of indecipherable superintelligent AIs. These AIs ‘engage with humanity only as byproducts affected by their actions, while they compute otherworldly questions of symbol manipulation’ (Locke 2017). Massive and eerie derangements of personal identity result as a billionaire plutocrat attempts to mobilize such AI instrumentally.
The truly great AI-SF is, however, perhaps that which slips across, plays with and permutates the possibilities we have schematically reviewed. Still unsurpassed in this regard (and of special interest because of the author’s evident deep engagement with Trotskyism) is Ken MacLeod’s extraordinary Fall Revolution quartet (2008; 2009), which, by adopting a ‘branching futures’ conceit, comprehends a series of AI social outcomes ranging from human-controlled AI planned-economies to hive-mind digital absorption to a de-growth abjuration of AI. A rather similar effect is achieved by the sequencing of Peter Watts’s recent Sunflowers short story and novella (2018) cycle. In this sequence, the protagonist’s early ecstatic connection to AI yields to cynicism and then horror as she is recruited in an endless interstellar exploration journey under the direction of a narrow AI – ‘the chimp’ (Watts 2018) – because the corporate directors of this colonizing journey dare not instantiate AGI that might escape their control. For this reason, the cargo includes a cryogenically frozen crew summoned out of sleep at century-long intervals whenever an emergency requiring lateral thinking occurs. Yet despite this function, the humans are, it transpires, also expendable on a strict cost-benefit basis. The most recent story in this series ends with the defeat by AI surveillance powers of an attempted human mutiny. At the close, the heroine, who has made herself complicit with the suppression to forestall the oxygen-starvation death of all her co-workers, reflects that the emergence of an autonomous AI might offer the best possibility for the crew’s escape from enslavement. Yet the overall sombre tone of Watts’s universe raises the obvious question of whether such an intelligence would be an ally or an enemy to its proletarian fabricators.
introduction: ai-capital
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