Financial Times Europe - 19.10.2019 - 20.10.2019

19 October/20 October 2019 ★ FTWeekend 9

Books

A

re you one of those people

who worry that super-

intelligent robots will one

day wipe out or enslave

humanity? If so, you are in

good company: Elon Musk, Bill Gates

and the late Stephen Hawking have

soundedthisalarm.

But consider for a moment what will

happen if we manage to tame the

wonder-machines we or our descend-

ants will almost certainly build. They

will be far smarter than us, so it would

be stupid not to let them make all the

important decisions. They will master

all branches of knowledge — including

howtoenhancetheirownintelligence—

so there would be no point in people

dedicating their efforts to learning any

more. They would supply all our physi-

cal needs, so why wouldn’t we sit back

andindulgeourselves?

We may survive our own most power-

ful creations but end up the equivalent

of wildlife in a safari park, overseen by a

benign intelligence whose own goals we

couldneverhopetofathom.

This version of the future of artificial

intelligence is conjured up by Stuart

Russell inHuman Compatible, a thought-

provoking and highly readable account

of the past, present and future of AI.

A professor of computer science at the

University of California, Berkeley,

Russellisgroundedintherealitiesofthe

technology, including its many limita-

tions, and isn’t one to jump at the over-

heatedlanguageofsci-fifavouredbythe

likes of Musk. But through an explana-

tion of today’s AI techniques, and by

sketching out the breakthroughs that

are still needed, he makes the path to

superintelligenceseemalltooreal.

Human Compatible s intended mainlyi

as an answer to what is known in AI cir-

cles as “the control problem”: how to

make sure AI always remains under

human guidance, and working for

human benefit. Along the way, the book

becomes atour d’horizon f the field. Ifo

youarelookingforaseriousoverviewto

the subject that doesn’t talk down to its

non-technical readers, this is a good

place to start (even the appendices, lay-

ing out the main approaches to today’s

AI,areamust-read).

The problem with keeping control of

artificial intelligence, according to Rus-

sell, lies in the way we build all our

machines. They are optimised for a

given purpose, which is built or pro-

grammed in from the start. This is fine

as long as the machines’ powers are lim-

ited. But when they reach superhuman

levels of intelligence, they will be able to

work out for themselves how to achieve

theirends.Wemaynotliketheresults.

No matter how carefully the objec-

tives are set, the world is too complex,

and the ingenuity of the machines will

be too great, for us to predict or control

the outcome. Russell’s answer: we

should never give the machines a firm

goal, but force them instead to con-

stantly search to understand our pref-

erences, adjusting their goals along

theway.

What, though, do people really want?

Whether individually or in the aggre-

gate, this may end up being the hardest

question of all. We spend much of our

livesflounderinginthedark.Evenwhen

wearen’tbesetbyprideandenvy,ordis-

tractedbyemotion,wecanneverseefar

enough ahead to tell if our supposedly

rational actions are the right ones to

achieve our desires. The problem, in

fact,liesnotinthemachines,butinus.

Russellsucceedsinmakingacomplex

subject intelligible without falling into

the sort of crass popularisation that

often infects books on important tech

topics. He deploys a bracing intellectual

rigour, such as when he explodes the

many arguments that have been made

for why AI couldn’t pose a threat to

humans. But a laconic style and

dry humour eep his book accessible tok

thelayreader.

At heart, Russell is an optimist. Shap-

ing our ultimate technology, he says,

will mean drawing on psychology, eco-

nomics, political theory and moral phi-

losophy. What is the best way, for

instance, to maximise human happi-

ness? Would it involve engineering a

small population of exceptionally con-

tented souls, or a much bigger human

race of the only mildly happy? And how

should a superintelligent machine bal-

ance the selfish interests of its owner

against an altruistic regard for human-

ityatlarge?

Problems like these have been the

stuff of moral philosophy for centuries.

With the advent of super-

human AI capable of drastically reor-

dering society, we will have to come up

with some very real answers — or suffer

theconsequences.

It is in dealing with the collision

between technology on the one hand,

and human and social values on the

other, that Russell is at his most effec-

tive. His insistence on making the

technology subservient to the human at

all times may sound obvious but it is a

guiding philosophy that biggest tech

companies seem, all too often, to have

forgotten.

Even if we get the solutions to these

questions right — or, at least, right

enough to ensure a bearable existence

for the mass of humanity there is still—

the final trap. Our descendants may end

up surrendering their autonomy to the

machines,renderingthemhappybut on

longerincontroloftheirowndestiny.

Escapefrometernalpassivity,accord-

ing to Russell, will require “a cultural

movement to reshape our ideals and

preferences towards autonomy, agency,

and ability and away from self-indul-

gence and dependency”. This will only

come about with “human preference

engineering on a global scale along

with radical changes in how our

societyworks”.

How could such a drastic reset of

human desires be achieved? Why, with

the help of AI, of course. Our most bril-

liant creations will one day have to save

usfromourselves.

Richard Waters is the FT’s US

West Coast editor

Human Compatible;

Artificial Intelligence and

the Problem of Control

by Stuart Russell

Penguin $28/ Allen Lane £25

352 pages

A demonstration of face-recognition technology at the WorldAI Conference, Shanghai, 2019 —Qilai Shen/Bloomberg

It’s not them, it’s us

A bracing but accessible look at the collision between AI and human

values finds that our flaws pose the real problem, writesRichard Waters

Blood brothers

War and torture belie the chivalric obsessions of a 15th-century

‘new Camelot’ in this saga of royal rivalry, writesKate Maltby

F

or a generation of school chil-

dren raised on Eleanor and

Herbert Farjeon’sKings and

Queens, Edward IV was the

shifty hero of one of the 1932

collection’s most memorable poems.

“King Edward the Fourth was gay. King

Edward the Fourth was charming.” But

“heupside-downedhisbrotheranddro-

wnedhim,deadinabuttofmalmsey”.

Farjeon wasn’t far wrong. Edward IV

was a youthful war hero turned seedy

sun-king. Having seized the throne in

1461 (the first time) just shy of his 19th

birthday, he presided over a court that

tottered bibulously on the line between

chivalric self-glorification and flat-out

debauchery. Visiting ambassadors col-

lapsed from exhaustion or, in one case,

gout. But Edward was needled by his

tetchy brother George, Duke of Clar-

ence, whose secretive execution for

treasonin1478gaverisetothestorythat

he had been drowned in a butt of his

favourite sweet white wine. Meanwhile,

another brother was quietly amassing

his own power. His name was Richard,

Duke of York — to readers of Farjeon,

“CrookbackDick”.

Thomas Penn’s weighty new volume

takes as its titular subject the lives of

these three brothers. ButThe Brothers

York s primarily a biography of thei

charismatic Edward — and a superb

biography at that. Interwoven is the tale

of three different brothers, the Yorks’

cousins through their mother Cecily

Neville. Richard Neville, Earl of War-

wick, is known to history as the “king-

maker” and Edward’s most powerful

political minister; we also meet George

Neville, the cultured and canny Arch-

bishop of York, and his doughty warrior

brother John, whose hold over the north

of England played an essential role in

securingEdward’searlyreign.

The Nevilles and the Yorks had expe-

rienced pain and loss together. Each trio

of brothers had originally been a set of

four. The York boys’ father, Richard,

Duke of York, and the Nevilles’ father

Richard, Earl of Salisbury, had died

fighting together at the Battle of Wake-

field,eachalongsidetheirsecondson.

he tragedy and brutality of the WarsT

of the Roses jumps out from every page

— and the Yorks dished out to their Lan-

castrian opponents indignities equal to

those they had suffered. After the deci-

sive Battle of Towton, the victorious

Yorkistshackedoffthenosesandearsof

enemycorpses,topreventtheiridentifi-

cation at the resurrection. In defiance of

Christian code, they were buried facing

west. “When they awoke and sat up on

the Day of Resurrection, their scarred,

sightless eyes would be looking away

from the sun and the risen Christ.” This

isnotabooktoreadatbedtime.

By 1461, the Yorks and Nevilles had

seized power from theadvisers around

The Brothers

York: An

English Tragedy

by Thomas Penn

Allen Lane £30

688 pages

P

atti Smith once told how her

live wire stage act with its

wild whirls and incantatory

verses stemmed from advice

given to her as a young

woman by her then lover, the author

Sam Shepard. He encouraged her to

loosen up and improvise. “What if I

mess it up? What if I screw up the

rhythm?” she responded. “You can’t,”

he assured her. “It’s like drumming. If

youmissabeat,youcreateanother.”

This was “the secret of improvisation,

one that I have accessed my whole life”,

Smith wrote inJust Kids, her 2010 mem-

oir of her emergence as a poet and rock

star in New York in the 1970s. The

poetry she wrote in those days seemed

to have been dashed off in a heightened

state of inspiration, portal to a visionary

realm populated by the Romantics,

beatsandcursedpoetswhomakeupher

literary heroes. She first set her poems

to music in a public reading in 1971, at

the suggestion of Shepard. It opened

new possibilities for artistic spontane-

ity. “I wanted,” she explained, “to infuse

the written word with the immediacy

andfrontalattackofrockandroll.”

The punk dervish who once broke her

collarbone tumbling from a stage

remainsamagnetisingliveperformerin

her seventies. But a melancholic note

has entered her work. Winner of the

NationalBookAward,Just Kids emori-m

alised her close relationship with the

dead artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Its

follow-up,M Train, revolved around

another dead man, her husband Fred

“Sonic” Smith of rock band the MC5.

Now comesYear of the Monkey, which

revolves around two friends on the

threshold of death. One is Shepard, suf-

fering from the incapacitating effects of

LouGehrig’sdisease.

Just Kids as a straightforward workw

of memoir. ButYear of the Monkeyfol-

lows in the digressive, surreal footsteps

ofM Train. The latter book opened with

Smithsittinginacaféwithhernotebook

wondering how to write about nothing.

Her new one starts with her seeing in a

lonely New Year’s Day in 2015 in Santa

Cruz in California. Staying in a motel

called the Dream Inn, she enters a

dreamlike state herself. She encounters

a talking motel sign that resembles the

hookah-smoking caterpillar fromAlice

in Wonderland nd a changeable mana

called Ernest, “maybe Mexican, but

maybe Russian”, who shares Smith’s

love of the Chilean novelistRoberto

Bolaño. “Some dreams aren’t dreams at

all, just another angle of physical real-

ity,”heassuresher.

The book proceeds to move back and

forth between the real and the fantastic.

Unresolved mysteries and shaggy dog

stories pastiche a Bolaño novel. Missing

children, the mysterious appearance

of thousands of sweet wrappers on a

beachandastrangelyfamiliaroldphoto-

graphofawomanandhersonmakepuz-

zling appearances. References to the

Pied Piper,The Wizard of Oz nda Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland mplify thea

sense of fantasy. The mood is whimsical

andimprovisatory,withSmithfollowing

whereverherimaginationleadsher.

Amid this dream diary-style action,

she wanders around the west coast,

returns to New York, despairs about

the rise of Donald Trump and pays

visits to the increasingly infirm Shepard

inKentucky.

Her other mortally ill friend is Sandy

Pearlman, a 1970s rock renaissance

man who played a key role in encourag-

inghertotakeupmusicbackinherNew

York garret days. InYear of the Monkey,

he lies in a coma in a San Francisco hos-

pital, suspended between life and death

— much like the book itself is caught

between actual happenings and magical

realism. A touching linkage is made

between the unconscious Pearlman and

the busy subconscious workings of

Smith’s imagination (“I could keep vigil

wherever I may be, composing another

kind of lullaby, one that would perme-

ate sleep, one that would wake him

up”). But the results are slighter than

the more thoughtfully conceived story

thatshetoldinJust Kids.

The hallucinatory mood has a man-

nered, overworked feel. “Something

seemed to have a hand in my so-called

improvised movements,” she writes at

one point, as though detecting the

sound of clunky mechanics within her

otherwise fine prose. The secret of

improvisation, learnt from Shepard all

those years ago, has on this occasion

eludedher.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the

FT’s pop critic

In a dreamlike state

Patti Smith’s latest offering

is a melancholy and surreal

tale of two friends on the

threshold of death, writes

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Year of the

Monkey

by Patti Smith

Bloomsbury £12.99

192 pages

their cousin Henry VI, who suffered

from severe mental illness and may

havebeenincapableoffatheringtheson

withwhomhiswifehadpresentedhima

few years earlier. Given Henry’scondi-

tion, Warwick’s cruel parade of the cap-

turedkingin1465readspainfully:“War-

wick hadhim lashed to a donkey, legs

tied to the stirrups, arms roped to his

sides,astrawhatperchedonhishead”.

Meanwhile, Edward IV was enjoying

his new status. With the shadow of the

#MeToo movement hanging over his

text, Penn makes no bones about

Edward’s sexual exploitation of impov-

erished young widows forced to petition

the new king for enforcement of their

inheritanceclaims.

Against all this barbarism, the chival-

ric obsessions of Edward’s court may

seem contradictory. But Penn’s achieve-

mentistoplaceattheheartofhisnarra-

tive the stories that Edward’s followers

wanted to tell themselves. This is a

worldofyoungmenwhoseinsistenceon

seeing themselves as a new Camelot was

anessentialveneertothebrutalitywait-

ingtoburstoutatanymoment.Thuswe

get a plausible explanation for Edward’s

greatest act of political self-sabotage —

his decision to marry, secretly and on

impulse, the unsuitable Elizabeth of

Woodville. He was a chivalric hero and

he wanted to live like one. It was a mis-

judgment that would eventually push

both Clarence and Warwick — blind-

sided while negotiating a French mar-

riage—intoopenrebellion.

Penn is particularly good on the need

to view English politics through a Euro-

pean context. Every machination of

Philip of Burgundy or his son, Charles

the Bold, trickles down to affect wool

pricesinEngland’sheartlands.Concom-

itantly, Penn is good on money. Credit

and international finance lie behind

every political shift. At times, there’s an

over-enthusiasmforcontemporarypar-

allels: the biggest merchants of London

(and even York) are repeatedly and

lazily referred to as “oligarchs”; there’s

much talk of elites and populists. Turns

ofphrasearerepeatedabittoooften:the

sobriquet “ever-reliable” seems to be

appliedtohalfofEdward’s(highlyunre-

liable) court. None of this, of course, is a

significant distraction from an impres-

siveandengagingread.

Penn is less interested in the well-

worn controversies around the reign of

Richard III. He dismisses with scholarly

ease the blacker calumnies perpetrated

against Richard by his Tudor succes-

sors, while being clear-eyed about Rich-

ard’spower-grab,whichattheveryleast

led to the deaths of Edward IV’s two

young sons. Thus Richard, like Clarence

before him, devoured his own family’s

posterity. With an abundance of male

heirs, as Penn reminds us, the House of

York could have ruled England for gen-

erations. Instead, within a quarter of a

century from Edward’s coronation, it

haddestroyeditself.

Their insistence on seeing

themselves as a new

Camelot was an essential

veneer to their brutality

By Kei Miller

origins disputed but most likely leave-over from the

Spanish.Oracabeza, Golden Head, though what gold was here

other than light glinting off the bay, other than bananas bursting

out from red flowers? Though this too is disputed — not the

flowers — but the origin of bananas; they may have come here with

Columbus on a ship which in 1502 slipped into Oracabessa the way

grief sometimes slips into a room. In those days the sailor tried to

name the islandSantiago, as if not knowing we already had a name,

in another language, a language whose speakers would soon all die

— though this too is disputed — not the deaths, but the completeness

of genocide. For consider, if you will, such leave-over words as

hurricane; considerbarbecue; considerXaymaca, land of wood and

water — of wood and water but not of gold. Could someone please

go back in time and tell Columbus, in Taino there is no word

for gold. Christopher Columbus, in ItalianoCristoforo Colombo,

en españolCristóbal Colón. A teacher once told me ‘Colón’ is root

word for colonist, and though I know that was false etymology,

there is some truth to it. Oracabessa — place where you might find

such tranquil villas asGolden Ridge,Golden Clouds,Goldeneye—

long-time home of Ian Fleming who sat there on cliff’s edge, the

morning’s breakfast brought to him by a woman named Doris,

the scent of ackee and crisp-fried breadfruit wafting up to his

nostrils while between his teeth he bit a number 2 pencil, all the

time looking out to sea as if fishing for a story — maybe a man — an

incredible man — let’s call him Bond. James Bond. Who knew 007

wasn’t actually Scottish, but a barefoot bwoy from St Mary, Jamaica.

Like so many others, he too migrated — the brutish winter cooling

his complexion down to white. Such stories!Goldfinger,Goldeneye,

the Man with the Golden Gun. Did you never stop to wonder where

all this gold came from? Did you never stop to ask, what was

found in El Dorado? Well, let me tell you: not a nugget, not an

ounce of ore — but light gilding the bay, and perhaps bananas, and

perhaps ackee, and such language as could summon wind to capsize

Columbus’s ships — and if that’s not gold, then what is?

From ‘In Nearby Bushes’ (Carcanet, £9.99)

The Poem

Place name: Oracabessa —

The book moves between

the real and the fantastic.

Unresolved mysteries and

shaggy dog stories pastiche

a Roberto Bolaño novel

We can never see far enough

ahead to tell if our ‘rational’

actions are the right ones

to achieve our desires

OCTOBER 19 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201917/ - 17:16 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD9, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 9, 1