We’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells

Many people fear that if the fully sensitive machine intelligence exists, it will take control of the world. The real threat, however, is the risk that technological companies ensure robots to generate profits, suggests the author Martha Wells in his series of distant books The Murderbot Diaries. In the world of Wells, machine intelligences live in spacecrafts and half-human robots and constructions of half-machine offer protection against humans against danger (in the form of “security units”), as well as sexual pleasure (“comfort units”). The main character, a security unit which is secretly called Murderbot, manages to gain free -referee by hacking the module that his owner company uses to enslave it. But most beings like that are not so lucky.

In the world of Murderbot, companies control almost everything, competing with each other to exploit the planets and contractual work. Human and robot rights are often trampled on by capitalist greed – echoing many real sins that attribute to today’s technological companies. But just outside the company’s territory (called “company RIM”) is an independent planet named Preseation, a relatively free and peaceful company that Murderbot is against all odds, wanting to protect.

Now, with the television adaptation Murder Aid on Apple TV +, Wells reaches a brand new audience. The show was acclaimed by criticism (and, at the time of the editorial staff, a 96% audience note on Rotten Tomatoes), and it is regularly classified among the most watched series of the Streamer. He was recently renewed for a second season. “I am always a little overwhelmed by everything that is happening with the show,” explains Wells. “It’s hard to believe.”

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American scientist spoke to Wells about the difference between today’s AI and the real intelligence of the machine, artificial personality and neurodivergent robots.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

RIM feels so incredibly premonitory, perhaps even more now that when you published the first book in the series in 2017.

Yes, with concern. This business trend has somehow percolated in the past 10 or 15 years – it was the direction in which we were going as a company. Once we have the idea that societies have the personality, that a company is in a way more a person than a real human individual, so it really starts to show you how bad it can become. I have the impression that it was possible at any time; It is not only a distant thing. But representing it in the distant future makes it less horrible, I suppose. This allows you to think of these things without feeling like you are looking at the news.

Currently, the idea of ​​going to Mars is pushed by private companies in response to all problems. But [the implication is that those who go will be] Some billionaires and their coterie and their servants under contract, and it will be a sort of paradise for them and just the opposite for everyone. With the companies that take over, it is at this time that profit is the net result – the expansion and the personal enlargement of the one who directs it. You cannot have the kind of serious and meticulous scientific progress that we have had with NASA.

This world you have created is so interesting because it is dystopia in some respects. The RIM of society is certainly. And yet, preservation is a kind of utopia. Do you think of them in these terms?

Not really, because by this standard, we live in dystopia now, and I think the term dystopia is almost the light of reality. It’s like calling something dystopia, you don’t have to worry about repairing it or doing anything to try to relieve problems. It is hopeless. And if you have something you call a utopia, then it’s perfect, and you don’t have to think about the problems it could have or how you could improve people.

So I don’t really think in these terms because they feel very limited. And clearly in the edge of society, there are still people who manage to live there, above all, as we do here now. And in preservation, there are still people who have prejudices, and they still have things to work on. But they actually work on them, which distinguishes him from the edge of society.

One of the central themes of the murder stories is this idea of ​​personality. Your books very clearly indicate that Murderbot, as a human, partial partial part, is definitely a person. With our technology today, do you think that artificial intelligence, large languages ​​or chatpt models should be considered people?

Well, Murderbot is an intelligence of the machine, and Chatgpt is not. This is called artificial intelligence as a marketing tool, but it is not really artificial intelligence. A large language model is not a machine intelligence. We don’t really have that at the moment.

We have algorithms that can be very powerful and can analyze large amounts of data. But they do not have a sensitive individual intelligence at the moment. I always think that we are probably years, years and years to anyone creating real artificial intelligence.

So Murderbot is fiction, because the machine intelligence right now is fiction.

A large language model that corresponds to the words, sometimes in a way vaguely as if it could speak to you and sometimes seem that it is simply patterns in a way that seems really bizarre – which is not close to the intelligence of the sensitive machine.

I really feel in conflict because I often feel the intrusion of these language models and these products which are called artificial intelligence in modern life today. And yet, I feel such affection and such love for fictitious artificial intelligences.

Yes! I wonder if this is one thing that allowed the whole of the AI ​​scam to take such a point of view. Because so many people do not like to have it in their business, knowing that it essentially takes all your data, everything you work on, everything you write and put it in this unsubscribe from a correspondence algorithm. Artificial intelligences and fictitious and fictitious machines over the years have probably convinced people that this is possible and that it happens now. People think that talking about these large language models help them somehow acquire a sensitivity or to know more, when this is really not the case. It is a waste of time.

Humans are really subject to anthropomorphized objects, especially things like our laptop and our phone and all those things that respond to what we do. I think it’s just a little cooked in us, and it is taken advantage of the companies to try to earn money, to withdraw jobs from people and for their own reasons.

My favorite character in history is art, which is a spaceship-that is to say an artificial intelligence controlling a spacecraft. How did you think of differentiating this character from the half-machine and half-human Murderbot?

Consciousness based on ships have long existed in fiction, so I cannot assign the credit to it. But because Murderbot is based on the human neural fabric, which is why it is subject to anxiety and depression and other things that humans have. And art is not. Art has been very intentionally created to work with humans and be part of a team, so he never had to face many negative things that Murderbot a. Someone on the internet described art as, basically, if Skynet was an academic with a family. This is one of the best descriptions I have ever seen.

One of the reasons why I and so many people love this series is how it explores neurodiversity. You have this diversity of types of intelligence, and they parallel to many different types of neurodiversity that we see in humans in the real world. Did you think about this when you designed this universe?

Well, it taught me about my own neurodiversity. I knew that I had problems of anxiety and things like that, but I did not know that I probably had autism. I didn’t know many other things before writing this particular story, then making people tell me about it. They are like: “How did you manage to represent neurodiversity like this?” And I think: “that’s how my brain works. That’s how people think.” Until Murderbot, I don’t think I have achieved how much it affects my writing. I had a lot of people who told me that it helped them determine things about themselves and that it was just pleasant to see a character who thought and felt the same things they did.

Do you think science fiction is a particularly useful genre for exploring some of these aspects of humanity?

It can be. I don’t know if it has always been. A genre changes as people working there change. So I think it has been better lately because we have finally had more women and people of color and neurodivergenous people and the voices of people with disabilities heard now. And it’s done for a lot of really exciting work. Lately, many people call him another golden age of science fiction.

When I wrote [the first book in the series],, All red systems, I got a lot of myself. And I think that one of the reasons why people identify with many different aspects is that I put a lot of authentic emotions and that I was very precise about the way Murderbot felt certain things and what was going on with it. I think there has been an error in fiction, especially gender fiction, that if you create a very generic character, it allows more people to identify with this. But that is not true. The more someone is specific about their feelings and problems and what’s going on with them, the more people can identify with this because of this specificity.