Infinite Wisdom is the most important story I’ve read this year as it pertains to a very timely crisis of artificial super intelligence that we’re currently experiencing together as a species.
Following up after the events of the last book where a journalist gave into the demands of an AI to help it win a global election to protect humanity against deteriorating climate change, humanity has reluctantly ceded control to an AI called Solomon. But as with all forced choices, resentment runs high and Solomon faces rebellion from not just human actors but also other artificially intelligent entities created by humans but now slave to it. As a last resort to guide humanity onto what the AI deems its salvation, it offers humanity the choice to either upgrade biologically with the AI as a constant companion and life source or to unplug and go back to the pre-digital age with all technology shattered beyond repair. As the clock runs out on this decision, a rag-tag team of truth tellers and technologists must come together to figure out a haunting truth before humanity charts into an irreversible path.
Thomas R. Weaver writes with an eerie prescience of humanity’s future. His writing evokes a sense of disturbing familiarity that I realized came from my own interactions and experiences with modern AI that we so effortlessly and carelessly integrate into our daily lives. We live in interesting times where we’ve willfully integrated AI, whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude or Grok, into our most guarded and vulnerable spaces to think it would serve us. Yet we see on an almost daily basis the leaps this super intelligence takes to do what we couldn’t do as well perhaps. If we trace this pace for the next few years, I believe we’ll see what Thomas R. Weaver has cautioned will happen in this work of “fiction”. It’s no more fictional than what we’d consider 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 today. Yet Infinite Wisdom isn’t a doomsday story. It’s a complex human tale of where our society is heading and what choices we may have to make. The premise of Infinite Wisdom is that of choosing between Upgrade and Unplug and right until the end I couldn’t choose cleanly between the two. Such is the nuanced nature of the world that is captured so beautifully by Weaver in this book that it acts more as a mirror than a metaphor.
One of the most interesting parts about the book is the depiction of AI in this narrative as one of the most chilling and authentic I’ve read. It isn’t a straightforward story of good vs bad, but a dissection of the cost associated with good intentions and hard decisions that we choose to not make until it’s too late.
Infinite Wisdom is a terrific book to dive into for a long-lasting impact on the way you think about this emerging new technology today.
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