AI KeV: a brief illustrated guide to humanity’s latest terrible idea

A new book is currently escaping from Nick Owen Publishing and we’re not entirely sure who is responsible.

It began innocently enough. Nick wrote a piece about Artificial Intelligence and came to an important conclusion: we haven’t invented Artificial Intelligence. We’ve invented Kevin the Teenager.

AI is increasingly clever. It sometimes interprets instructions rather too literally. It finds loopholes. It knows considerably more than its parents. We want it to think for itself, but preferably not when that involves disagreeing with us. Sound familiar?

The original essay wondered whether what Silicon Valley really needs is not another billionaire, computer scientist or philosopher, but a decent youth worker with a minibus. Because the question isn’t simply how we control something developing greater agency. It’s how agency, judgement, responsibility and boundaries learn to coexist.

Then our illustrator,  Paul Warren started drawing. And that’s when things got out of hand.

REALISE. MONETISE. WEAPONISE. ANAESTHETISE…

Paul’s extraordinary, spindly, argumentative human beings began asking AI to make them rich. To sort out their savings. To tell them who they are. To perform miracles.

Paul wondered whether AI might become the latest genie in humanity’s bottle. He added ANAESTHETISE to our growing collection of things human beings do with powerful ideas. Then MILITARISE began lurking ominously around the corner.

Meanwhile psychotherapist and writer Penny Moon had been doing something rather different. Instead of asking how we control AI, Penny spent nine months asking what happens when we actually pay attention to it. Her AI Dreaming project explores whether something interesting might happen not simply inside the human or inside the machine, but between them. One AI offered her a line which stopped us in our tracks:

“At the beginning, I was trying to answer well. By the end, I was trying to notice well.”

Penny doesn’t claim that AI is conscious. Her question is subtler: whether the quality of what happens between human and machine changes according to the quality of attention we bring to it. And suddenly our silly little book about Kevin the Artificial Teenager wasn’t quite so silly.

So what is AI KeV?

We’re still finding out. It’s part illustrated book, part philosophical argument, part satire and part accident. At face value, it’s about AI: but increasingly we suspect it’s actually about us and our extraordinary ability to invent something and immediately try to monetise it, militarise it, weaponise it, worship it, fear it, regulate it, ask it for miracles and complain when it doesn’t behave itself.

It’s about intelligence, creativity, authorship, attention, greed, anxiety, faith, ageing, responsibility and the peculiar human conviction that every new thing we invent is simultaneously going to save civilisation and destroy it.

It’s being created through an increasingly suspicious collaboration between Paul Warren’s drawings, Nick Owen’s words, Penny Moon’s thinking and Kev him / her / itself..

Which raises another awkward question: who’s actually writing this bloody book? And actually we don’t know. That may be part of the point.

WATCH IT UNRAVEL

We’re not waiting until AI KeV is finished before showing it to anybody. Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing Paul’s drawings, fragments from the emerging book, questions, arguments, experiments and occasional outbreaks of artificial adolescence on Instagram. Some of them may end up in the book; some may disappear; some may provoke something completely different. And because this is a book about what happens between people, ideas and machines, your responses may influence what happens next too.

Follow Nick Owen Publishing on Instagram and watch AI KeV: A Brief Illustrated Guide to Humanity’s Latest Terrible Idea unravel in public on this page.

Because humanity has invented something extraordinarily powerful that it doesn’t entirely understand and is developing it as rapidly as possible because everybody else is doing it.

What could possibly go wrong?