A.I. is Sweet and Tender

KAI-FU LEE — CHEN QIUFAN — AI 2041 — TEN VISIONS FOR OUR FUTURE — 2021

This book will remain a monument in the field of science-fiction and Artificial Intelligence in the coming years. The two authors have Chinese roots. Chen Qiufan is a recognized Chinese writer, writing in Chinese, and his stories have been translated. On the other hand, Kai-Fu Lee currently writes in English, and he is a well-known and well-established author in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

I will not discuss the technical and scientific commentary of Kai-Fu Lee on the sci-fi stories. They are technical, well-informed, and open as for the discussion of the possible development we can envisage in all the various fields concerned over the next twenty or thirty years. I will concentrate on the stories because they are a very special case of science fiction, and I must say, they may be fascinating at times.

The first idea we have to keep in mind is that the stories are not projecting us into a future that can only be dreamed of. The future the stories envisage is perfectly imaginable today, perfectly even possible today. The additional dimension of Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning — and even Deeper Learning –, Quantum physics and Quantum electronics or computing science is not suggesting things that are out of the direct and short-term predictions we can decently suggest without becoming a visionary guru of the world in two centuries. In fact, this science-fiction is quite in line with Jules Verne’s own approach: let’s see what what has been tested recently in some labs could produce within twenty years, which would have been fifty years in Verne’s time. But the story about going around the world in eighty days was not using non-existing techniques and machines but bringing together types of machines and traveling devices that already existed. At times he went beyond this realistic science-fiction, and he flew to the moon which was not to happen for at least something like 80 or 90 years.

This being said the stories are worth our effort to get the book and read them.