20 April 2019 | NewScientist | 43DON’T MISS
Watch
Celebrate UNESCO’s Year of
Indigenous Languages with
SGaawaay K’uuna (Edge of the
Knife). This uncanny 19th-century
tale is performed in Haida, an
endangered language. It screens
from 24 April in the Canada Now film
festival at Curzon Soho, London.Listen
CrowdScience on the BBC World
Service on 26 April at 8.30 pm BST
asks whether physics will ever run
out of particles to discover.Read
Kenneth Miller’s The Human Instinct:
How we evolved to have reason,
consciousness, and free will (Simon
& Schuster), and Stephen Asma
and Rami Gabriel’s The Emotional
Mind: The affective roots of culture
and cognition (Harvard University
Press) offer contrasting views of the
human psyche.Last chance
John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing
closes at Two Temple Place in London
on 22 April. It explores the polymath’s
views on science, natural history and
the impact of industrialisation.Visit
An acclaimed touring exhibition
about director Stanley Kubrick
comes to London’s Design Museum
on 26 April. Relive iconic moments
from the films that, among other
things, showed us how to picture
the future (pictured).
the Turing test taken to extremes.
If you can’t tell, then you just have
to assume you must treat them
exactly as if they were human.One of the highlights of the novel
is when Adam becomes extremely
attached to generating poetry.
Have you experimented with this?
No, I have no interest in
AI-generated poetry. Of course,
I speak here as a novelist. When
a robot could write a novel that
you could not tell was written by
a robot, in which it had the whole
range of human interactions,psychological insight,
understanding of the subjective
nature of consciousness, then
I’d say we were just about there.
At that point, I would have to
say you may now sit on juries,
if you can write a good novel.Would you welcome that?
I guess it would be like, dare I say
it, a bit like when we had that
argument about the Booker prize
in which we let Americans come
in. If we get to the point where we
say, well, a human hasn’t won the
Booker prize for 50 years, we say,
yes, but look at what wonderful
books we’ve been reading. Or a
robot might be saying that to us.For more books and arts coverage, visit newscientist.com/culture
Ian McEwan says novelists will love
the moral tangle of humans and AILIZHI
NGLE
Y^ FORNEW^
SC
IENTISTYou seem intensely relaxed about
the prospect.
I’ll be dead. And I don’t really
hold out much hope for an
afterlife, so I won’t be watching.
Who knows? The whole thing
might be irrelevant because
we’ll have a nuclear war in the
next 15 years.Does that concern you? Should
we worry about nuclear war or
climate change rather than AI?
I never like to say what people
should worry about. But yes,
I think there’s a real possibility
that we might not get through
the 21st century without a nuclear
war somewhere. India, Pakistan,
China versus the rest. Russia,
Europe, America. Or Saudi Arabia
and Iran. There’s plenty of
possibility.Is that a problem that AI could
solve, do you think?
It might be a very logical decision
of AI to, say, launch a pre-emptive
attack. Or think that if nine-tenths
of humans were eradicated that
it might be a kind of victory.
Who knows what logic applied
to this would do? In fact, I have
Adam speculate, if you wanted
to cure cancer then you’d just
have to kill all the humans. And
then no one would have cancer.
You have to watch where logic
takes you in this. ■This article has been edited from
a video interview. To watch it, visit
newscientist.com/machines-like-me