THINKING, DREAMING, PLOTTING MACHINES
“I’d never give AI any sort of creative control over my work,” says Appupen, who has a new book on the subject
In 1863, readers of The Press,a newspaper printed out of a small cottage in Christchurch, New Zealand, were confronted by a strange article. Amidst the usual reports of sheep gone astray, and trends in barley prices, there was a long piece with rousing lines such as “Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.”
The author was confident “…that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants...” This piece, written by Samuel Butler, who would later have a career as a celebrated novelist, could equally be a blog post today, a centuryandahalf later. One might argue that machines today possess as much or as little of “consciousness” as they did then, but no one can deny that our reality has been fundamentally reshaped by even the possibility of dreaming, thinking machines. Joining this long tradition of warning against their rise, is Dream
Machine (Context), a graphic novel written by Laurent Daudet, and drawn and adapted by Appupen.
After my first read, encountering huge chunks of information on themes from particle physics to human rights in Turkmenistan, I reach out to Appupen, who I’ve known for a decade. This is the opposite of “dumbing down”, I tell him. “Done dumbing down,” he replies, “it kills us.” I say that I had to read it with multiple tabs open on my computer. He laughs, “I had to break down the tech stuff exactly like that — with multiple tabs open. Once the tech modules were in, I figured it’s going to be an intense read.”
Digital immortality
The story begins with Hugo Klein — a standin for author Daudet — the CEO of a company called KLAI, about to enter into a lucrative deal with REAL.E, a kind of combination of Facebook and Microsoft, headed by Kripp, who is a kind of Zuckerberg and Musk figure. KLAI’s expertise is in Large Language Models (LLMs) and textbased learning — the underlying technology behind generative AI.