When historians in future centuries compile the complete annals of humanity, their output will be divided into two volumes. The first will cover the hundreds of thousands of years during which humans have been the highest form of intelligence on Earth. It will recount how modified apes invented stone tools, writing, sliced bread, nuclear weapons, space travel, and the Internet, and the various ways they found to misuse them. The second volume will describe how humans coped with a form of intelligence superior to their own. How did our species fare once they surpassed us in intelligence? It is rather exciting that the first pages of that second volume may be about to be written. Depending on whom you ask, artificial general intelligence—systems capable of matching humans and then leaving them in the cognitive dust—is months, years, or a decade or two away. Predictions of how this might play out range from everyone enjoying a life of leisure to the extinction of the human race at the hands of paperclip-twisting robots.
ChatGPT is only a couple of years old; AI bigwigs are still divided on whether its intelligence can be compared to that of a cat. If that sounds reassuring, consider the newt. This isn’t just any salamander, but the fictional heroes of Karel Capek’s “War of the Newts,” published in Czechoslovakia in 1936, a great beach read and a chillingly prophetic allegory for advances in artificial intelligence. In the satirical novel, the captain of a Dutch ship stumbles upon a race of sea creatures in Indonesia. The crew is baffled when the child-sized beasts playfully pelt them with rocks and seem to respond to human cues. How ingenious! Just as we were all amused in 2022 by AI’s ability to generate an image of dogs playing poker à la Caravaggio, our fictional ancestors marveled at how these new forms of fast-learning intelligence could mine valuable pearls. Then, as now, an opportunity to profit is spotted. Soon, salamanders are demanding knives to produce more pearls. Sure, what could possibly go wrong?
The comedy of unintended consequences that follows will be familiar to those who care about AI. Knives help the salamanders defeat predatory sharks that had been keeping their numbers in check, leading to a population boom worthy of Moore’s Law. As the salamanders multiply, it becomes clear that they are dumber than humans, but they evolve at a surprising rate. Before long they are conversing as fluently as a chatbot. A nebulous “Salamander Syndicate,” a kind of Big Tech that sells newts by the millions, finds new ways to train the abundant creatures and put them to work in farms and factories. The Panama Canal is expanded at little cost to humans. Fears that all this is happening too quickly are dismissed as warmed-over Luddism. The bonanza of cheap salamander-workers is denounced as “antisocial” by the International Labor Organization; Today, it is the IMF that warns that 40% of jobs could be affected by AI. Australia imposes a tax on newts, similar to the tax on robots that Bill Gates, a prolific machine facilitator, once suggested.
Not everyone is happy about this “age of salamanders,” a precursor to today’s “age of AI.” The creatures’ consumption of the world’s food supplies worries critics, just as machine learning models are now criticized for their electricity consumption. Questions are being raised about whether humans who hire newts are responsible for their actions, just as a court recently forced Air Canada to honor a discount made by an AI-enabled chatbot that had hallucinated politics. Some people become fond of newts when they learn to dance and sing. The Daily Star asks “Do newts have souls?”; in 2023, America, a Catholic magazine, goes for “Does ChatGPT have a soul?” Today, many feel that software is metaphorically eating the world. Capek’s newts, by contrast, devour land, creating new coastal habitats to house their ever-increasing numbers.
Newt sellers, trying to reassure humans, argue that their products simply mimic humans and cannot outperform them (this sounds familiar today, too). Inevitably, the once-fuzzy creatures end up doing exactly that. By the time people realize that they have no idea how newts actually work (what happens underwater is as mysterious to Capek’s humans as what happens in the cloud is to today’s AI users), it’s too late. People are too wrapped up in their own obsessions to notice what’s going on; the Germans are busy arguing that their newts are ethnically superior to others. Newts can always find some greedy human to sell them explosives or submarines.
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Capek was active in Czech political circles and studied philosophy in Paris and Berlin. There is something typically European in his fear of the New Thing. There are good reasons for Europe to worry about the rapid changes brought about by salamanders or rapidly evolving computers. Particularly in southern Europe, social systems depend on things evolving at a pace that the often authoritarian state can keep up with. In the book, the French are the first to try to slow down the salamander takeover. Today, while the US makes much of the investment in AI, it is the European Union that has spearheaded its regulation. The bloc’s AI Law, so far the world’s strictest straitjacket on the technology, will formally come into force in August. Machines that recognise faces in public and Chinese-style “social scoring” systems will be banned.
Capek also imagined a dystopian future in the hands of robots, a term he coined in an earlier work (it’s Czech for “servant”). But not even a science fiction writer could imagine man-made technology evolving at the pace of today’s AI — hence the salamanders. In the book, weak-willed humans hand over China to their new overlords in the hope of buying peace. In 1938, just weeks before Capek died, his homeland was similarly sacrificed to appease the Nazis. “War with the Salamanders” has been praised for its depiction of the hubris and greed of 20th-century humans. It may one day end up being remembered for its understanding of 21st-century machines.
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