Tag Archives: books

What, a coincidence? What a coincidence!

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This post is going to have spoilers for “Feet of Clay” by Terry Pratchett, and “As a Thief in the Night” by R Austin Freeman.

Last week I was browsing in a used bookstore… or, rather, a used-book store… and decided to buy a Terry Pratchett “Discworld” novel: Feet of Clay.  Pratchett wrote many many books set  on Discworld, they’re kinda zany, very lightweight, fun reading. I’ve read three or four of them over the past few decades and I can’t remember the plot or characters in any of them, but I remember enjoying all of them, so I thought eh, why not.  And sure enough, the book was a fun read.  There’s a kind of murder mystery, as well as an attempted-murder mystery, and some lovable rogues and so on. The attempted-murder mystery involves administering poison by making candles with arsenic in them. The victim reads by candlelight at night, even as he gets sicker, and over the course of several nights the poison does its work.

I finished that book, and the next day I was walking to lunch on my own and decided that rather than my usual solo-lunch pastime of playing terrible online chess, I would pick up a book at one of the three (!) Little Free Libraries I can pass on the five-block walk to lunch. I had already passed two of them and didn’t feel like walking back, and the remaining one had rather slim pickings, but I was happy enough with As a Thief in the Night, by R Austin Freeman. As you have no doubt guessed by now, in the first third of the book someone is discovered to have died of arsenic poisoning and the police are baffled as to where the arsenic came from, but of course it was done via poisoned candles.

As far as I recall, in my entire life I’ve read only one other story involving poison candles: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” (I had to look up the title).  I assume all subsequent stories with that plot element are ultimately children of that one.  ChatGPT in ‘extended thinking’ mode comes up with four such stories: Imp of the Perverse, Feet of Clay, a Marvel Comic from 1983, and a mention of a shop selling poisonous candles in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Of course we know that’s not a complete list, since it doesn’t include As a Thief in the Night, and presumably there are some others missing too. But still, I’m pretty sure there are very few published works that include this plot device.

I read a fair amount — I’ve read a couple of thousand books in my life, I guess — so it’s not so surprising that I’ve read a few stories involving poisoned candles.  But to read Feet of Clay and then, in the very next book that I selected from a very small choice being given away on the street, to pick up another one… when I reached the point in As A Thief in which the cops start puzzling over how the poison was administered, I thought “you’ve gotta be kidding me. What are the odds?”

“What are the odds” is essentially unanswerable for this kind of thing. Yeah, sure, this particular coincidence was extremely unlikely but a person experiences millions of opportunities for coincidences in their life and some unlikely ones are bound to occur.  Also, to mention it just so nobody else has to, almost everything that we experience is ‘unlikely’ just due to statistical mechanics (or something akin to statistical mechanics, just very high entropy): a car passes me on the street, its license place is CNV 1193, wow, isn’t that amazing, what are the odds that that specific car would pass me at that exact location at that exact time, why, it’s unfathomable.

Still, we can acknowledge that there is nothing supernatural about coincidences like the one with the arsenic-laden candles while still enjoying them when they occur.

I have discussed coincidences on this blog a couple of times: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/12/01/amazing-coincidence-what-are-the-odds/ and https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/11/08/if-you-wanted-to-be-a-top-tennis-player-in-the-late-1930s-there-was-a-huge-benefit-to-being-a-member-of-____-or-to-being-named-____/

I’m not claiming that these are in any way enlightening.  And I apologize if hearing about my coincidence is as boring as me telling you about the dream I had last night.

 

What does “Neuromancer” have to teach us about the role of AI in society?

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This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew.

From junior high through about sophomore year in college I read a lot of science fiction, went to some science fiction conventions, etc., but then I drifted away from the genre for eight or nine years. What brought me back was “Neuromancer”, by William Gibson. It had come out in 1984 when I was in college but I guess I had already stopped reading science fiction by then, or else I somehow missed that specific book, so I didn’t get around to reading it until about 1992. The book is generally credited as starting the “cyberpunk” sub-genre, of which Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” is another great example, although there are many progenitors with similar DNA; indeed I’m not sure why the much movie Blade Runner isn’t given the credit (or perhaps something even earlier).

I haven’t read Neuromancer in about thirty years, but came across it while browsing a bookstore and thought eh, why not give it another read, the development of artificial intelligence is a major theme and maybe it’ll be interesting in that context, not just for entertainment.

There are some minor spoilers below, nothing that I think would interfere with one’s enjoyment of the book but if you are especially picky about this kind of thing then you might want to stop reading now.

In Neuromancer we encounter two types of artificial intelligence: artificial _general_ intelligence, as personified (machinified?) by AI’s known as Wintermute and Neuromancer; and ‘constructs’ such as the “Dixie Flatline construct”, which, we are told, is not truly intelligent but merely seems intelligent. The Dixie Flatline construct is “just a bunch of ROM” that answers questions the way a guy called “Dixie Flatline” would answer them himself. But then it turns out it’s not just about answering questions, Dixie Flatline can also hack into computer systems, pretty much like the person on whom it is based. And it can’t _just_ be ROM because it can remember things that you tell it.

I recall being somewhat puzzled by the distinction between the real AI’s and the “construct”, back when I read the book, since the construct sure _seems_ intelligent. But now that distinction seems entirely reasonable: the construct behaves very much like an LLM like chatGPT, which…well, I know there are people who think that as LLM’s get more sophisticated they are going to turn into artificial general intelligences, but I don’t think that’s the case. Artificial general intelligence is possible, and an LLM might even be a key component to attaining it, but I don’t think any LLM, no matter how grand, will be enough on its own. My younger self was puzzled by the distinction between the construct and a “real” AI, but now it makes perfect sense to me! Just think of the construct as an LLM that is trained to respond like a specific real person.

Another somewhat-realistic-seeming element of the book is that there’s an organization, colloquially called the “Turing Cops”, that is tasked with preventing AI’s from becoming too powerful. There’s a fear that if an AI becomes powerful enough it could destroy humanity, or at least do terrible things. There’s a lot of current discussion about whether or how AI’s should be regulated, although at least for now I don’t think that discussion is focused on the capabilities so much as who can use them and how, whereas in the book the Turing Cops only care how smart they get.

So…what about the title of this post, what does the book have to teach us about the role of AI in society? Nothing. Or at least, nothing I can think of. It’s a work of fiction written forty years ago by someone who, by his admission, knew nothing about the technologies he was writing about. Nowadays we might say he was “vibe-writing” or something. There’s lots of nutty stuff and some plot holes.

I guess I’ll mention one more thing that is purely on the literary side. The main character of the book, a hacker/cracker named Case, is objectively a horrible person, as is his girlfriend Molly. They lie, cheat, steal, kill, get involved in a scheme that kills dozens of innocent people and show no remorse about it, etc. But I spent the whole book rooting for them! The story is told mostly from Case’s point of view, and I kind of adopted his view of the world. He’s not without a sense of emotion or a sense of morality, but while reading I found that I liked the people he liked, disliked the people he disliked, was appalled by the things he found appalling but unbothered by the things that didn’t bother him. I don’t really have a point here, I just find the phenomenon interesting.

This post is by Phil.