The Economist November 20th 2021 Books & arts 87tions foreseeable. The rise of aisystems
undermines those consoling assump
tions, since responses may diverge from
human expectations, and to disclose capa
bilities may be to forfeit them. A winning
manoeuvre may be horrific yet inscruta
ble, like the algorithm that crushes human
players at chess and the board game Go.
The recommendation for policymakers
is realism. Since the technology cannot be
uninvented, the book calls on America to
develop and shape the military applica
tions of ai, rather than surrendering the
field to countries that do not share its val
ues. Some of the new capabilities will in
volve nonviolent tasks, such as managing
logistics and helping wounded service
men. At the same time, the authors write,
major powers should pursue arms control
in ai, as they have for nuclear weapons.
The fact that both Mr Kissinger and Mr
Schmidt have advised America’s armed
forces gives their counsel special weight.
Living with this technology will be
tough. Based, as they are, on correlations
and elaborate statistics, rather than on a
sense of causality, ai’s decisions may seem
otherworldly; when the stakes are high,
they must be diligently validated. And as ai
becomes more widely used, and makes
findings that surpass human understand
ing—whether concerning the laws of sci
ence, medicine, managing businesses or
navigating roads—society may seem at
once to be hurtling towards knowledge and
retreating from it. If an aicopilot or surgi
cal robot experiences an emergency, who
should seize the controls, the human oper
ator or the algorithm? The book calls for a
“partnership” between people and ma
chines, but is silent on how to achieve it.
Master and man
There are other shortcomings. A chapter
on “global network platforms” (ie, big tech
companies) is alternately banal, overab
stract and mealymouthed—as if wary of
offending any particular business or gov
ernment. In light of the many ways in
which ai bolsters state power, human
rights ought to be an essential consider
ation. Yet there is no discussion of the
camps in which, abetted by technology,
China’s rulers have imprisoned many
Uyghurs. The disappointing final chapter
is merely a recapitulation of the first.
Despite these faults, “The Age of ai” is a
salutary warning to handle this technology
with care and build institutions to control
it. Human values and peace must not be
taken for granted, the book urges. “While
the advancement of aimay be inevitable,”
it concludes, “its ultimate destination is
not.” With his coauthors Mr Kissinger has,
at the age of 98, used his vast experience
and versatile mindto make a muscular
contribution to oneofthe21st century’s
most pressing debates.n
I
ntheautumnof 1853 ThomasButler
Gunn got lost—temporally rather than
physically. On a visit to Mammoth Cave
in Kentucky, and isolated from the out
side world, his diary quickly slipped the
moorings of chronological reality.
Wednesdays are repeated and days go
mislabelled. It took around a fortnight,
and renewed contact with civilisation,
for Gunn to restore his weekly bearings.
The episode, says David Henkin,
suggests how fragile a sense of time can
be—especially when it comes to weeks.
Unlike months or years, these sevenday
groupings have no real basis in astrono
my. People from Nigeria to China have
thrived without them. And yet the week
has become the measure not only of
routine, but even of sanity. “Weekly
rhythms have become so thoroughly
absorbed into ordinary human experi
ence”, Mr Henkin writes, “that forgetting
what day it is constitutes a singular
symptom and feeling of disorientation.”
His new book shows how the week
came to rule the world. Until the 19th
century, he explains, the other days were
a preamble to the Sabbath for many
Protestants. Catholics followed a cycle of
feast days and fasts. When newspapers,
factory schedules and weekly paydays
were all rarer, the weekly structure was
less important. People got muddled, not
just underground. As late as 1866, the
Louisville Courier mentioned a man
getting drunk on Friday because he
thought it was Saturday.
In outline, the story is one of urbandevelopment.Astowns grew and society
becamemoresophisticated, citizens
“becamedifferentlyand more intensely
weekoriented,inways we can now
recognise as modern”. When his local
benevolent society met on Wednesdays
in 1859, and choral concerts were sched
uled for Fridays, James Fiske of Mass
achusetts couldn’t afford to mix up his
days. When Every Saturdaymagazine
landed in New York each weekend in
1866, Bayard Taylor was expecting it.
Later anecdotes illustrate the “dis
tinctive air” that individual days came to
develop—the particular associations
each subliminally carries. Philadel
phians once used chains to block horse
traffic on Sundays. The advent of wash
ing machines disrupted the weekly
cleaning schedule. In due course West
erners exported these feelings to the
world. Japan formally adopted the seven
day system only in 1873; all the same, a
character in a novel by Haruki Murakami
is as sure of something “as I am that
today is Wednesday”.
That sort of conviction is now crum
bling. French and Russian revolution
aries ultimately failed in their attempts
to abolish the sevenday week, but for
many people the pandemic has squashed
the weekly rhythm into an interminable
present. Monday, runs the joke, has been
replaced by Noneday. As Netflix offers
entertainment on a whim, and morning
newspapers become obsolete, Mr Henkin
argues that “the hold of the week on our
lives loosens, and our place in the cycle
becomes in turn less memorable.” Every
one may soon start to feel a bit like
Thomas Butler Gunn. MarkingtimeThe seven-day itch
The Week.By David Henkin.Yale
University Press; 288 pages; $30 and £20