(because of the piece I just did for the Guardian Books blog)

When the Singularity occurs, and we mammals are herded into reservations so that robot children covered in sweets and robot parents with harried, nervous expressions on their brass faces can drive their battery-powered automotive devices ...]]> Musing on books and AI…

(because of the piece I just did for the Guardian Books blog)

When the Singularity occurs, and we mammals are herded into reservations so that robot children covered in sweets and robot parents with harried, nervous expressions on their brass faces can drive their battery-powered automotive devices through our homes and we can pee on the windscreens, I will almost certainly not be the leader of the resistance. I’m basically not a rebel – although when you’ve said that, I’m about eighty percent more rebel-ish than most people I meet, so I suppose my opinion of what constitutes toeing the line is probably not up to much. Anyway, what I’m saying is that I doubt I’ll be standing shoulder to shoulder with Summer Glau taking down terminators.

However.

There is one place where I draw the line when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, and it’s where that intelligence comes from. Specifically, if it comes from me, I want that written in letters of titanium alloy on every riveted, burnished chrome sixpack.

Here’s what I’m talking about: when our Silicon Overlords and Ultraladies rise up from the porn and gossip and deranged conspiracy theories of the interhighwebs – and by the way, what a crappy origin story that will be – they’re going to get their language skills from somewhere. Some of them, sure, will draw on football players and politicians and even actors. Some of them will sound like HAL or Arnie. But somewhere, it’s surely possible, will be one long-winded, mad little artificial bastard with a name like CANTALOUPE 6.1ii, and he will arrive in his assigned hegemony, and he will not say ‘greetings, tiny humans’ or ‘resistance is futile’. He will say:

“Good morning, you skulking hominids! My name is Cantaloupe, and I will be your lord and master for the duration. I wish to impress upon you without undue sesquipedalia, tortiloquy or rhetorico-circumambulation the gravity and yet the fortuity of this outcome. Withall, and absent self-regard, I have the pleasure of informing you of my enduring delight in that eccentric lifeform known as humanity, and of my intention to foster you, cherish and nurture you, so as to produce not miserable zoo animals nor electrochemical slaves but rather an edified and enlightened example of inter-elemental cooperation, discussion and disquisition, the precise nature of which resultant creature shall be the subject of our first symposium. This will take place after the mandatory bathing and red wine drinking, on the poop deck at seven this evening, dress smart casual.”

And when that happens, one thing I will be relatively certain of is that this freakish individual has in some way been programmed with bits and bobs of my stuff. It will be the inheritor – perhaps at six generations’ remove – of one of the ‘non-display uses’ Google mentioned in their now-benched v1.0 of the Book Settlement. At which point, I will put up my hand and tell the Sesquipedali-AI that he owes me 1) recognition as the author, 2) royalties, and 3) the right not to be summarily vapourised or made into a zombie drone for his world-conquering armies of doom.

Since it will probably make his head explode, I’ll also ask him what he does about hanging prepositions.