32 | New Scientist | 4 April 2020
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WHY do people pray? An ancient
need for rules, civil organising
principles and origin stories
may help explain why many
seem primed to seek out a
higher power. But those possible
explanations aren’t the whole
story. It is what we might think we
are praying to that underpins our
enduring commitment to a deity,
and the notion that by appealing
to it we might shift unexplained
forces in our favour.
Today, one could be forgiven
for feeling the same about
algorithms. We increasingly
outsource to artificial intelligence
what our forebears would have
subjected to the divine. AI helps
us to better understand disease,
to work out the right length for
a prison sentence or even to
decide who should get medical
intervention. Which side of the
line the results fall can have a
large impact on someone’s life.
And while we have seen how
our human biases creep into such
machine judgements, the desire
to create something devoid of our
influence, a more omnipotent AI,
is seen in our race to develop AIethics and accountability.
Say we make it work: what
would an omnipotent AI be like?
What could convince us to cede all
our decisions to it? How would it
see us? Is there any way we could
pray to an AI to save us?
These are some of the questions
behind Providence, Max Barry’s
deceptively straightforward AIvs aliens romp. IT philosopher
Jaron Lanier says AI is less a
technology, more an ideology.
Barry ups the ante to make it
an emerging religion.
There is a hint of 2001: A Space
Odyssey in his plot. It puts four
people on a Providence-class
warship, effectively one giant,
sentient and utterly unknowable
AI – developed after humanity
made contact with an alien species
with similarly incomprehensible
objectives. This ship-AI can spotTo thine own god be true Is our love affair with AI really about building a new
kind of deity to meet the human need for a higher power? Max Barry’s excellent
novel Providence lays out the case, says Sally Adee“ What would an
omnipotent AI be
like? What could
convince us to cede
all our decisions to it?”Book
Providence
Max Barry
Hodder & StoughtonSally also
recommends...Book
Gnomon
Nick Harkaway
Windmill
Like all Harkaway’s books,
Gnomon is incredibly hard
to get into. But it rewards
persistence with a trippy mix
of genres that tickle the back
of the brain ceaselessly to a
narrative climax.patterns in the aliens’ behaviour.
It takes one to know one.
These terrifying and
unstoppable AIs have been
spawned by a global corporate
war on Earth, to the tune of a
sizeable chunk of global GDP.
The crew onboard the ship
are no match for its staggering
capabilities. In reality, the job is a
PR gig to sell the AI project to the
world’s citizens, who paid for it.
Because there is nothing to do
in the confines of space, the four
overqualified and bored heroes
ponder the existential question of
who they are to this unknowable
ship tasked with keeping them
alive in the hostility of space.
“There is logic to everything,”
says the intelligence chief, Gilly,
who sees the ship as a collection of
sophisticated code. “You just have
to look deep enough to find it.” But
Beanfield, the HR officer, has a
different idea, insisting that “if we
are throwaway survival machines
for genes, then the ship is our
throwaway survival machine.
If you want to think of the ship
as a body, we are its genes.”
The true relationship between
ship and crew is revealed when
the God-class intelligence engages
God-class firepower to protect
its charges. Considering who
survives, it is plausible that,
like the old gods, AI also favours
good supplicants.
Barry makes it clear what we
may lose if we choose to place our
faith in AI. The chilling corollary
is that if we do create an AI god,
we may be little more than genes
or blood to it – important in great
quantities, in good working order,
but irrelevant as individuals.
Is the new deity better than the
old? Finish the book and decide. ❚AF
ARCHIVE/ALAMYHAL, the AI that goes
disastrously wrong in
2001: A Space OdysseyThe science fiction column
Sally Adee is a technology
and science writer based
in London. Follow her on
Twitter @sally_adee