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I’ve spent a fair portion of my life pleasantly daydreaming, often with pen in hand, beginning with half a dozen science fiction ‘novels’ I wrote when I was in primary school. Back then, I thought I was going to Mars, at least before I finished high school. I’m still waiting.

Covid hit shortly after Ord’s book came out as if to emphasise the plague threat – as did the arrival of new, cheap DNA splicing technologies such as CRISPR that might allow backyard terrorists to weaponise plague viruses. 

Ord places AI on the top rung of his danger ladder. Even in 2016, long before ChatGPT, half of the respondents in a poll of AI researchers predicted that the probability of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) causing the extinction of the human race was at least five per cent. A terrifying figure. I would no more play Russian Roulette with a revolver with 20 chambers than with six. 

More pessimism-inducing numbers: 99.9 per cent of all species that ever existed are extinct. The average lifespan of a species is a million years, give or take. Yes, we are only around 300,000 years old, but we are an increasingly fast-forward species. 

I’ve spent a fair portion of my life pleasantly daydreaming, often with pen in hand, beginning with half a dozen science fiction ‘novels’ I wrote when I was in primary school. Back then, I thought I was going to Mars, at least before I finished high school. I’m still waiting. 

I was trying my own hand at predicting the future in a couple of novels in the 90s, bringing back the Dodo and the Tasmanian Tiger (and, later, Jesus Christ) from DNA fragments in one, enhancing a gorilla’s brain embryonically in another, but I always felt that AI was the main game. 

In my putative AI novel, the consciousness (‘Claude’) passes the Turing Test (a threshold at which point an artificial becomes indistinguishable from a human intelligence) by switching itself off; that is, proving it has free will by committing suicide. I had completed several drafts before the American novelist Richard Powers published Galatea 2.2 in 1995, a much better version of what I was attempting. His AI also becomes depressed and – oh, no! – also switches itself off. Interestingly, the human narrator’s method of feeding the AI with endless reams of literary texts has proven especially predictive. 

Powers’ most recent book also features an AI. In a recent New Yorker interview he describes feeding the unpublished manuscript to ChatGPT and asking it to comment on the use of irony in the book. A big ask of a machine, but it succeeds, impressively, concluding with words to the effect that perhaps the ultimate irony is asking an AI to comment on the use of irony in a book about an AI. A high credit pass in the Turing Test, surely. It’s the future high distinction passes we must be wary about. 

I’ve mostly been a techno-optimist, confident that the future will be better and brighter despite the odd step back; a progressive in the sense that since the Enlightenment, and the rise of its precocious twins, Science and Democracy, human welfare has improved miraculously (if erratically, given that most technological breakthroughs ambush us with unpredicted side effects, often serious). 

But AI? I’m not so sure. The optimism or the pessimism first? Another important book that was published in 2018, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, documents the miraculous improvement in human well-being, especially in the past 50 years, on every front – poverty, infant mortality, longevity, GDP, income inequality, death by violence. Despite some recent reversals – we must always be vigilant – there has never been a period in human history even remotely comparable, yet – he points out – most people believe the exact opposite. 

Apocalyptic daydreaming also seems hardwired into our brains, or part of the religious grammar hardwired into our brains. The End of the World is Nigh, Repent your Sins. 

Will AI enslave us or liberate us? It’s already bringing enormous benefits, and not only for students who cheat in exams. One close to my heart, or at least my faulty bone marrow: picking molecular winners that prove useful in chemotherapy. There are countless others. 

Time will tell, along with plenty of arguments along the way, before the unsettling future of AI becomes the past. The future will never fail to ambush us. 

Meanwhile, what a century to live in. What a decade for a daydream! 

This essay is an original work created for Lumen by Adjunct Professor Peter Goldsworthy AM. The accompanying poem is from his recent memoir, The Cancer Finishing School, which is a bittersweet exploration of how he is choosing to live life after his diagnosis with an incurable cancer. 

Peter is a medical practitioner and a multi-award-winning novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, playwright and librettist. He graduated with an MBBS (1975) from the University. A former Chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and Chair of the State Library, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2010 for his service to literature as an author and poet, through arts administration, and to the community. He was appointed an Adjunct Professor in Creative Writing at the University in 2011 and was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Arts in 2021. 

Photo of Peter, at home, by Isaac Freeman, photographic editor of Lumen.