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…