The Future has Already Begun

by AlgoHiggs, John Higgs, J.M.R. Higgs

Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

John Higgs' last book as rewritten by an AI, which was trained up on his work, then given the opening sentences of his chapters and left to its own devices. The scary thing is how much it almost makes sense. Some passages are hilariously strange, but elsewhere it comes out with entirely plausible prose, and more often it's the sort of thing you feel like you haven't quite got because you were skimming, so go back to reread, only to realise that no, it is absolute gibberish but gibberish taking advantage of the human mind's ability to pattern-match to pass as actual writing. Which said, I've certainly read books written by alleged real people that made less sense, not least when I had to do a term or two of literary theory. The scariest bits were when I really couldn't decide to which category a certain passage belonged. "Another way to model this is to assume that it is so physically possible that consciousness could emerge from the world that it is possible to make it out of potatoes", for instance – is that words assembled by a process which doesn't entirely understand what words are, but sort of knows how they fit together? Or has AlgoHiggs deduced my secret origin? Not to mention the indubitable if accidental truth of this one: "It should be no surprise that, on top of creating its own AI programme, Facebook aims to create the next generation of 'weird arseholes'." The overall effect is very reminiscent of a head injury, and I really wouldn't recommend reading more than about five pages at once. In fact. I'd probably recommend reading a lot less than that, full stop. Despite which, I polished off the last 40 pages or so on my journey in this morning. After all, the decision was hardly more contrary to my own best interests, nor the algorithm's flailings any more devoid of genuine thought, than those of the British public. As the AI so sensibly says: "To call them 'future generations' is to miss the point much too well".