Day 339: Preparing for AI: The Question Is the Answer
Chen Quifan, co-author of AI 2041, headed his introduction, “How We Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Embrace the Future with Imagination.” That’s the challenge of AI 2041, a series of ten short stories that imagine human lives as they may realistically be transformed by AI just twenty years after publication.
Imagination, Chen posits, is key. “"[W]ith every future we wish to create, we must first learn to imagine it.”
Imagining the AI Future
As a law professor who focuses on immigration, I’m reading books like these with two goals:
First, to anticipate and begin to map out questions about how AI will change human migration and governments that seek to control it.
Second, to explore what and how to teach law students to help them prepare for an unknowable future.
Answering with a Question
To Chen — a science fiction writer who teamed with technology investor Kai-Fu Lee on the book — the most important potential of fiction is not to provide answers but to raise important questions.
Fortunately, law professors are experts at answers the embrace uncertainty. (As the old joke goes, a law professor can answer any question with two words: “It depends.”)
Surely, we’ll all have more questions than answers in the coming years about how to prepare for and respond to AI. But right now, asking the right questions is half the battle.
