So if you were to succeed in working with some clever AI system – as Kasparov can today, as the biological half of a human-AI chess ‘centaur’– you couldn’t celebrate that success together. You couldn’t even share the minor satisfactions, excitements and disappointments along the way. You’d be drinking your Champagne alone. You’d have a job – but you’d miss out on job satisfaction.
Moreover, it makes no sense to imagine that future AI might have needs. They don’t need sociality or respect in order to work well. A program either works, or it doesn’t. For needs are intrinsic to, and their satisfaction is necessary for, autonomously existing systems – that is, living organisms. They can’t sensibly be ascribed to artefacts.
I write this in the dead of summer, always a bittersweet season — why is it we got summers off from school for all those years but don’t get summers off from work? — but doubly depressing these days, when I find myself suffering from picnic panic. The hot, languid weather brings with it a series of outdoor family events for which, as a tribal elder, I’m charged with providing provisions. Lately, though, I’ve had my feet cut out from under me. For years — nay, decades — my contributions to the Hingston clan’s Memorial Day and Fourth of July and Labor Day gatherings were no-brainers: I made what my mother once made. She was such a good cook that when she died prematurely, my husband and I typed up and photocopied (quaint, I know) a booklet of her recipes, tried-and-true favorites on which she built her formidable culinary reputation. When the holidays rolled around, I simply re-created one of her delicious dishes and toted it along.
Along about a decade ago, though, I began to notice I was toting home as much of my offerings as I’d concocted. My contributions were being overlooked — or shunned. Why should this be? Mom’s extraordinary potato salad — fragrant with dill, spiced by celery seed — went untouched on the picnic table. So did her macaroni salad, and her chicken salad, and her deviled eggs. … When I carted home a good three pounds of painstakingly prepared Waldorf salad — all that peeling and coring and slicing! — I was forced to face facts: The family’s tastes had changed. Or, rather, our family had changed. Oldsters were dying off, and the young ’uns taking our places in the paper-plate line were different somehow.
One day last November, I dropped my dad’s fountain pen on the floor. Actually it’s been my fountain pen since my dad died half a century ago, but I still think of it as my dad’s pen. Right away I could see that the nib had gone a bit wonky. No good could come of messing with a pen I loved and that was at least seventy-five years old. So the next morning I wrapped it up like a baby and took the bus to my favourite notebook-and-pen store and asked about fixing an ancient fountain pen. It was a busy morning, but a young woman at the counter, who perhaps recognized me as a profligate shopper in the store, went off to fetch Rose, the one who knew about repairs, while I lifted my dad’s pen from its swaddling clothes. When Rose came over, she was smiling but already shaking her head: “I’m sorry, I’m not really doing repairs any more, so . . . oh my gosh, is that,” she said, “that’s a Parker 51!” She drew it from its nest with reverence, noted the wonky nib, thought for a moment and said, “I’ll take it out back and see what I can do.” On her way she showed the pen to another colleague, who ooh’ed and aah’ed and touched the brushed-silver cap—“Sterling! And in such good shape.” By the time Rose emerged from out back, word had got around and a couple of customers were waiting to get a look at my dad’s pen.
Rose had coaxed the nib a bit closer to where it belonged. She said she could nudge it a little more, but it might snap. Should we take the chance? On a bit of test paper I wrote “Dad’s pen with wonky nib” and drew some curlicues, which worked well enough that I decided she should stop there. Off she went to do a bit of cleanup on the pen, but not before showing it to one more worker—a young man, who had never before seen a Parker 51 “in person,” and who I’m pretty sure had tears in his eyes.
Wilson tells this story with meticulous attention to detail and an almost omniscient command of her sources. In doing so she offers a number of small but necessary corrections to the sometimes self-serving inaccuracies of Graves’s own account of the same period, and persuasively argues that Graves’s father made a more significant contribution to his son’s poetic success than Graves was prepared to allow. The real strength of this biography, however, lies in the care and vigour with which it animates the conflicting strands of Graves’s personality. To encounter him in these pages is to feel something of the relentlessly explosive energy with which he lived the first half of his life. Wilson lands him like a Zeppelin bomb.
Quammen offers a readable and largely reliable Baedeker to a fast-moving and complex field of science that is as tangled as the tree of his title. He ultimately concludes that Darwin was not wrong, but that his tree of life was too simplistic. Yet, though Quammen shapes a truly fascinating tale, it’s clear that this story is not yet finished.
A beguilingly light tone masks but never mars Thomson’s impressive scholarship.