The Rise Of The Intelligent Authors

Lochlan Bloom wonders what writers will do when computers become better writers than humans.

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Over the past century the pursuit of facts has come to be the central goal of human progresss, with the dominant perception being that facts are important while fiction is at best superfluous. Yet there is increasing evidence that we as humans live our lives in a realm of fictions. It seems we are preconditioned to accept stories and embed them in the deepest fabric of our societies – for example, stories of nationhood, society, economics, or religion. And yet the ability to determine facts is now normally seen as the more vital human trait: facts are important, fiction is superfluous. Reading a book or watching a film of an evening is something to do to relax after a hard day of productivity, a hard day discerning the facts in whatever area of work you are engaged.

But as the philosopher-historian Yuval Noah Harari claims in an interview, “We cooperate with millions of strangers if and only if we all believe in the same fictional stories. The human superpower is really based on fiction. As far we know we are the only animal that can create and believe in fictional stories. And all large scale human cooperation is based on fiction” (youtube.com/watch?v=JJ1yS9JIJKs).

Here I want to argue that the coming rise of artificial intelligence presents a threat to our way of life not only because it is very likely we will become much worse than machines at determining facts, but also because we will, in all likelihood, become worse than machines at creating fictions.

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