Wénjié / 文洁

Misc:

A few years ago, I read the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Liu Cixin, best known for the first book, The Three-Body Problem. At the time, I was also lurking on various AI-related subreddits that ranged from deeply sceptical to full-on accelerationist. I use AI extensively for coding, and although it’s transformed the output I can produce, I have deeply mixed feelings on the subject.

On the /r/accelerate sub, I kept coming across people who believed AI was going to magically fix everything wrong with their lives. Somehow, LLMs would bring them fulfilling relationships with anime cat girls, let them live out their wildest fantasies in full-dive VR, and deliver a generous Universal Basic Income. They’d never have to worry about jobs, real human connections, or anything else for that matter.

It reminded me of Ye Wenjie in The Three-Body Problem - a woman who’d witnessed humanity at its absolute worst and decided to outsource our salvation, seeking help from across the stars to fix Earth’s problems, one way or another.

As an aside, the Chinese TV adaptation by Tencent captures this perfectly. If you think you’re up to speed because you watched the Netflix version, I’m sorry to say you are not. The western adaptation is nothing more than a sketch of the original, drawn by someone with an attention disorder, memory problems, and trouble with fine motor skills.

But Ye Wenjie's core philosophy - the growing sense that a non-human entity can do things better than we can - is starting to have a noticeable effect on us. Those who realise AI is now much more than just a “next word predictor” are beginning to question what actually makes humanity special.

There’s a sense of ennui settling over academics in certain fields, especially among those who realise that the AI we have right now is the worst it’s ever going to be (short of some catastrophic collapse). As we outsource our thinking, our art, and our salvation to the servers, we have to ask if we are just building the next step of evolution. Voltaire wrote, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” We might be doing exactly that.