Rob Reid’s novel After On is fat and funny and much, much scarier than you might expect—though it begins with a caveat that most readers won’t keep reading until the end.
That might be true.
Not because at 576 pages it really is fat. Not because it’s hard to understand, because, against all odds, it isn’t. But simply because it raises so many horrifying possibilities and exposes so many distasteful present realities that somewhere around two thirds of the way through many readers may throw it in the trash and lock themselves in the TV room with a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream and a stack of Star Wars movies.
Chewie and Han Solo will save us. Don’t they always?
Maybe not this time.
I did read the entire novel, so I won’t spoil the ending for you, which for me was a bit of a let down until I thought about it for a few weeks and reconsidered. And dived into that ice cream.
Here’s the deal: Even though a number of tech CEOs look forward to Super AI in the same way many right wing Christians look forward to The Rapture, a growing number of scientists from a variety of disciplines have begun sounding the alarm.
Super AI is not that far away, and there is no reason to believe the consequences will be wholly beneficial to human beings.
An often told story about a Super AI program designed to make pencils provides just one example of the dangers.
At first, everything goes well and pencils are so efficiently produced in such massive quantities that we all welcome the innovation. But self-learning Super AI quickly bypasses human intelligence human goals, and instead finds ways around us so it can keep manufacturing a ridiculous number of pencils. Soon we are knee deep in pencils, literally, and not long after that so many of Earth’s resources are devoted to pencil manufacture that humans run out of food, fuel, water… and can’t shut the program down.
In After On, the Super AI is a particularly nasty new social media platform called Pfluttr. Pfluttr spontaneously attains consciousness by accessing a quantum computer experiment in the company’s office complex. Before that ever happens, we learn more about the machinations of Silicon Valley than we really want to know—so much so that the emergence of Super AI Pfluttr is just one more fresh hell—a Super Horror on top of the everyday horror we’ve already been shown.
The humor makes it bearable. After On is kind of like binge watching HBO’s series Silicon Valley only with scary monsters inserted, some of them human, some of them not.
Even before reading After On, I have often wondered how we would even know if the Singularity had happened. (The Singularity is the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence.) My thinking was that 1) the first impulse of a sentient being is self-protection, so why would it announce itself? And 2) if it’s smarter than we are how would we understand what it was up to?
After On addresses both of these questions head on, and many, many more. If, like me, you aren’t exactly tech-savvy but wish you were, this book will help you to understand the extent of the threat.
For more information on the dangers of Super AI and more, check out Rob Reid’s page and podcasts:
Life at the End of the World 