Vasily Grossman and Artificial Intelligence

Reading about the current bullishness about artificial intelligence research, and the physical demands of the computation involved, has recently had me in mind of a passage in Vasily Grossman's World War II epic Life and Fate. In an epigram to one of his chapters the author remarked that electronic machines, possessed of "faultless" memory and "able to solve mathematical problems more quickly than man" could perform any number of tasks (even "play chess" and "translate books from one language to another"), with, apparently, no "limit" existing to their progress--such that he could imagine such machines "able to listen to music and appreciate art . . . compose melodies, paint pictures and write poems," and even "recreate" the subtlest of human emotional states: "childhood memories . . . tears of happiness . . . the bitterness of parting" and all the rest. However, it also seemed to him that as the machine's capacities were enlarged so was its size and its power consumption, to the point that "the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine" that would simply "reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being," of whom billions already dwelt on the Earth, never mind attain the possibility of transcending humanity in what we would today call "the Singularity."

Grossman closes the remarkable epigram, in which in respects he seem to have grasped some of the challenges and problems involved, with the thought that "Fascism annihilated tens of millions of [the] people" that it would have taken this worldwide machine to simulate the mind and memory and soul of a single one.

I wonder how many of those few who have ever stumbled upon those remarks, if only as an interesting "quote" rather than part of the work of literature from which it is derived, understood what all that meant then, and means now, as the developments in artificial intelligence, and the resurgence of fascism, force both subjects on our attention today.