, known by the Twitter handle @TetraspaceWest, said the inspiration came about because Lovecraft's monsters are "indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don't involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I."Astounding Stories - February 1936 - "At the Mountains of Madness" by H. P. Lovecraft. Artist Howard V.
While artificial intelligence is based in machines, the monsters in the novella are organically bred slave creatures that develop brains and their own will, Joshi pointed out. Lovecraft describes a shoggoth as a column of foetid black iridescence" consisting of "protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light.
"So the general metaphor of an artificial creation overwhelming its creator does have some sort of parallel to AI , but it's a fairly inexact parallel," Joshi wrote. In our world — a world beset by toxic wildfire smoke and water shortages, violent insurrections in democracies, and the most military combat in Europe since World War II — AI is just part of a whole. There's a lot ofaround it, as well as positive potential. There are also real concerns, namely in how AI could act as an accelerant for bigotry and extremism, or as an engine for misinformation, or as a job killer.