the museum of extraordinary things a novel

Max Tegmark, a professor of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the president of the Future of Life Institute, which sponsored the open letter, has publicly admitted, “We don’t know how to stop the meteorite we have created.” “Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?” asks the letter. After all, a Google vice president just quit his AI job to tell the world about “the existential problem posed by artificial intelligence.” When EL PAÍS asked Geoffrey Hinton how a capitalist system can slow down AI research and development, he simply said, “I don’t know.” We live in a time when 1,000 researchers, entrepreneurs and intellectuals (Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak…) signed an open letter calling for a pause on AI research and for regulations on “unpredictable models” beyond ChatGPT4. Most experts agree we’re not anywhere near Shannon’s vision yet, but we seem to teeter on the edge of dystopia.

Long before Claude Shannon (1916-2001), known as the father of information theory, uttered the sentence that’s displayed at the end of the exhibition: “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.” It opened a couple of years ago, long before ChatGPT made the front pages of the mainstream media and leaped into the global consciousness. It’s a sort of futuristic Ouija board and the person answering the questions is the ghost of the past, an obsolete and frustrated life form who is growing more and more irritated.Īlthough it makes you feel really old, the Hyper Human exhibition at Sweden’s National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm isn’t even that new. Would you have a chip implanted in your brain to make you smarter? Would you leave your elderly mother or baby in a robot’s care? Should that robot have rights? Would you allow supposedly impartial artificial intelligence (AI) software to judge your legal case? Would you transfer your consciousness to the cloud in order to live forever? A person stands in front of the screen, touching the “Yes” or “No” buttons that appear after each question. A touchscreen hanging in the middle of the exhibition highlighted all the questions for everyone to see.

The museum of extraordinary things a novel