In his 1928 short story “The Machine Stops”, EM Forster imagines a ruined Earth where humans occupy isolated pods lined with buttons to serve their every need, from cold baths to literature, connected by an all-seeing communications machine. Even before the pandemic, this little-known story was traded among technologists as a prescient vision of the contemporary internet. A quote from it opens Shannon Vallor’s clarifying new book, The AI Mirror.Vallor is a philosopher of technology who has spent most of her career in Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara University, latterly moving to the University of Edinburgh. Her first book, Technology and the Virtues (2016), was bathed in California sunshine. It gently asserted the relevance of “virtue ethics” — philosophical approaches dating back to Aristotle, Confucius and Buddha that centre around human qualities such as courage, moral imagination, honesty and empathy — in learning how to thrive in today’s technological age.
The AI Mirror extends this argument, with an urgent new call to, per the book’s subtitle, “reclaim our humanity in an age of machine thinking”. No prizes for guessing what’s changed: the release of OpenAI’s human-fluent chatbot, ChatGPT. Vallor’s new book sits among dozens published this year grappling with a world where it appears Forster’s literature button has become a reality. The AI Mirror stands out for its witty, crystal-clear exposition of the real threat from AI.
The author urges us to recognise that, far from being the handmaidens of a superhuman intelligence, ChatGPT and similar technologies underpinned by so-called Large Language Models (LLMs) are merely “giant mirrors made of code, built to consume our words, our decisions, our art . . . then reflect them back to us”. However real they seem, mistaking them for the beginnings of an Artificial General Intelligence — AGI, ie, machine sentience — is misguided, because “these mirrors know no more of the lived experience of thinking and feeling than our bedroom mirrors know our inner aches and pains”.