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defrogTruly I am.
The Star Mouse by Fredric BrownMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I generally like Fredric Brown, and read him when I get a chance, since so much of his work is criminally out of print. So I was chuffed to find out that Project Gutenberg has archived some of his stories from his early pulp SF days. I decided more or less at random to start with this tale from 1942 about, yes, a star mouse, albeit a not-exactly-willing one.
The story starts with Professor Oberburger, a scientist who fled Nazi Germany and now lives in Connecticut, where he is trying to develop rocket fuel for a small experimental spaceship capable of going to the moon. For a test subject, Professor Oberburger captures a mouse living in his house, which he names Mitkey. The professor doesn’t expect Mitkey to return from his maiden flight. But he does – after an unexpected encounter on his way to the moon …
Well, it’s good fun, really, although I’ll add that the twist ending (one of Brown’s trademarks) adds a bittersweet aftertaste to what otherwise have been a cute Disney-eque story. And given Mitkey’s namesake, that may have been intentional on Brown’s part. Anyway, it’s a good yarn. Fair warning: Brown is one of those writers who writes foreign accents into the dialogue (“Und now, idt is budt a madter of combining der fuel tubes so they work in obbosite bairs,” etc), which slows things down some, but everyone did it in those days, and at least Brown is good at it.
Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen HaoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
One of my day jobs is tech journalism, so of course I’ve been writing a lot lately about AI. I also read publications like MIT Technology Review quite a bit, so I was already familiar with Karen Hao’s excellent journalism work with them. So I was keen to read this, which is mainly the story of OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT and its variants) and its founder Sam Altman, but also the rise of the AI industry itself, and how that rise is fast creating an oligarchy of corrupt and exploitative technological empires (with OpenAI leading the charge) with real control over resources and people, especially in developing countries with less economic and political power.
In essence, Sam Altman started OpenAI as a non-profit research company with the goal of developing AGI (artificial general intelligence, the theoretical version of AI that’s as smart or smarter than human intelligence and therefore potentially the most dangerous) before anyone else does to ensure that it’s developed ethically and safely and benefits humanity. But in the process of chasing that goal, OpenAI has sparked a tech arms race that consumes huge amounts of energy and water, hoovers up copyrighted and personal data of everyone on the planet without their consent, and employs people in the Global South to clean up that data for sweatshop wages (not to mention the psychological impact of having to watch the absolute worst of the web all day long to make sure it doesn’t end up in AI datasets) – all while OpenAI has increasingly sidelined its own safety teams in its quest to stay ahead of everyone else.
As Hao points out, this is not an anti-AI book, but a warning of where the current AI leadership is headed with its imperialist mindset (consciously or otherwise) and who’s getting exploited along the way. Hao also makes the argument that it doesn’t have to be this way – we can have useful, ethical and beneficial AI, but we’re not going to get it from Silicon Valley broligarchs. It will only happen when people organise at grassroots community levels and work to redistribute that power, and regain control of their data and land being commandeered to build these empires.
Inevitably, the book is already outdated, as the AI industry has continued to evolve and grow in positive and negative ways. But Hao tells the story as well as it can be told, and especially excels at covering the hidden cost of AI on communities in the Global South, which for me is the more interesting part of the book – I’d have liked to see more of that and less of the OpenAI corporate drama, though I can see why that story had to be told to understand why all this is happening. Needless to say, fans of OpenAI, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Silicon Valley techbro hype may not like this as much as me. So it goes.
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Empire down,
This is dF
