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British writer Ian McEwan, author of novels such as 'Amsterdam' and 'Atonement', predicts that "it will take a catastrophe for humans to react to artificial intelligence (AI)" and take steps to "regulate it".
McEwan participated this Thursday in a meeting with international media on the occasion of the presentation of his latest novel, 'Machines Like Me' (Anagrama), in which he places the protagonists in the year 2119, from where they look at this first quarter of the 21st century with envy and curiosity for the possibilities and resources still available.
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The protagonist is the academic Thomas Metcalf, who is investigating a literary dinner held in 2014. There, the poet Francis Blundy read a love poem dedicated to his wife. A poem of which no trace remains, but which left a mark on everyone present.
Set in a future marked by flooding, climate collapse, and mass displacement, the novel engages with the most urgent concerns for the reader's present, such as loneliness or climate change, a subject of special interest to McEwan "for more than twenty-five years now."
Although the author's prediction of the future in the novel does not seem very promising, he defends "a certain optimism" as the best attitude "in an increasingly strange and anxious world."
Pessimism paralyzes
"Collective pessimism has a paralyzing effect; it is like a metaphysical glue that we must shake off," he opined during the meeting.
A world today in which, unlike centuries ago, what will be left of us will not be letters, but thousands of data points on the internet, emails, photographs, and WhatsApp messages.
A digital trail that although it will be "very extensive," he noted, "will not provide anywhere near the same information about who we were or how we felt as an intimate letter recovered from someone from the 18th or 19th century."
The British author advocated for big tech and AI to be regulated despite financial resistance, because, in the end, "it is politics."
"We live in a moment in which privacy is threatened. But also one in which it is more difficult to keep the mind free to think and imagine, and even to enjoy the pleasure of solitude," he reflected.
The prolific McEwan, who confessed that every time he goes for a walk new stories come to his head, assured that he did not research excessively for this latest one nor for the previous one, 'Lessons'.
'Googling' in his head
"I am 78 years old and have lived so much that I can now afford to 'google' in my head, among my multiple thoughts," he said.
In the book, he reflects on the difficulty of knowing what a person really lived through in the past and what really happened at a historical moment.
Regarding that reflection, he insists on defending the importance of teaching History in schools as a basic skill that cannot "disappear." Something that, he pointed out, is "unfortunately" happening in the United Kingdom.
On the emergence of AI, he denies that anything can replace the pleasure of getting lost in a novel. "The novel cannot die because it remains our best means for examining our lives and probing our minds."
Ian McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories, 'First Love, Last Rites'; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Femina Étranger (1993) for 'The Child in Time', and the Shakespeare Prize in Germany in 1999.
With 'Amsterdam' he won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1998, and his novel 'Atonement' received numerous awards, in addition to being adapted into a film directed by Joe Wright which won an Oscar.
[Publicidad]