Stories That Matter

Today’s Story That Matters is more a genre of story retold than any particular story. You can start with Prometheus, who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humans, who naturally made a mess of things. Frankenstein’s subtitle is “the Modern Prometheus,” and we know all about the dangers of “playing God” from that constantly retold story. Nowadays, stories of AIs gone rogue abound, and have been for years. I particularly like Ex Machina, where a mad scientist intentionally creates and unleashes what he assumes will be humankind’s successor, a really smart and ruthless robot. I just finished book two of a Sci-Fi series called Hyperion, about a distant future where people have become dependent upon technology they don’t understand and can’t control, leaving them totally vulnerable to a federation of emancipated AIs who just may not have their human creator’s best interests in mind. The lesson is simple and we know it well: careful with your inventions as they might might come back and bite you in the ass.

What interests me more than the lesson is what we’ve done with it. People certainly haven’t stopped scientific and technological advancement. We keep making new stuff, and every time, we pay in surprising ways. It seems a law of nature that with every benefit comes an unintended consequence that tips the balance back toward suffering. Just in the last few generations we made nuclear bombs, industrial food, the internet, smart phones, and now LLMs that are pretty much smarter than 99% of us. Do we ignore our stories that supposedly matter? I don’t think we do. I think we take our Prometheus stories to heart. It’s just that we don’t know about all the ways we’ve stifled innovation. At least, we don’t think about it much. But we have restrained ourselves in many areas.

We edged up to the brink with nuclear weapons, and then the global leaders got together and made some real moves to step back. The nukes are still there, but they just don’t feel as scary as they were at the start. In general, we have left a lot of military weapons on the table, from biological to self replicating nanobots, to fully autonomous lethal weapons. We haven’t pursued genetic engineering of humans to the degree that we could, not yet at least. We don’t have the kinds of biological toys we see in the movie Bladerunner, or the organ harvesting clones described in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. All to say, things could be worse, if not for the stories we keep telling, the warnings we can’t quite ignore, as hard as we try.