In his book Culture And Anarchy, Victorian author Matthew Arnold wrote of “sweetness and light” – or beauty and intelligence – as antithetical to the philistinism of money-minded industrialists, shopkeepers and bankers. “He who works for machinery,” Arnold implied, “works for hatred, works only for confusion”.
Authors have also been blind to the rich drama of business. At the time of the financial crisis, Howard Davies, the former financial regulator, once lamented British authors were “more preoccupied with life after working hours and below the waist” than in banks and law firms. However, that seems to have changed with novels such as Tahmima Anam’s The Startup Wife and Alexander Starritt’s Drayton And Mackenzie.
In fact, Musk has credited science fiction as formative, telling Rolling Stone magazine: “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.” Particularly influential was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which he described as “seriously paralleling Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire”.
“The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilisation, minimise the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”
Christian de Cock, professor of organisation studies at Copenhagen Business School, notes science fiction author Iain Banks has been named as an influence by prominent tech figures including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, as well as Musk. As utopian – or dystopian – scenarios play out in fictional plot lines, he says, such fiction can help us “understand difficult issues that the integration of AI systems in our corporations and society throw up”.
Source: CNA
