The Breakup

We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be better than the country we’ve got, on its 250th birthday, no less? Kurt Andersen. We’re taking up his book, a novel about a married couple in trouble inside a nation in trouble. But we have to note the moment we’re in, mid-September, when the titans of our technology have given us, in effect, apocalypse week in the news, warning us that artificial intelligence—the way they’re building it—runs a measurable risk of killing the human species, all of us, forever, in the next 10 years. Kurt Andersen is a one of a kind, tireless noticer, a serious funny man, too, founder of Spy magazine in another lifetime, also Studio 360 on public radio, and he’s an old hand inside the dark side of AI. The post The Breakup appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.