Book Review: “2040” by Pedro Domingos
Pedro Domingos is a computer scientist at the University of Washington. I’ve known him for years as a guy who’d confidently explain to me why I was wrong about everything from physics to CS to politics … but then, for some reason, ask to meet with me again. Over the past 6 or 7 years, Pedro has become notorious in the CS world as a right-wing bomb-thrower on what I still call Twitter—one who, fortunately for Pedro, is protected by his tenure at UW. He’s also known for a popular book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, which I probably should’ve read but didn’t.
Now Pedro has released a short satirical novel, entitled 2040. The novel centers around a presidential election between:
- The Democratic candidate, “Chief Raging Bull,” an angry activist with 1/1024 Native American ancestry (as proven by a DNA test, the Chief proudly boasts) who wants to dissolve the United States and return it to its Native inhabitants, and
- The Republican candidate, “PresiBot,” a chatbot with a frequently-malfunctioning robotic “body.” While this premise would’ve come off as comic science fiction five years ago, PresiBot now seems like it could plausibly be built using existing LLMs.
This is all in a near-future whose economy has been transformed (and to some extent hollowed out) by AI, and whose populace is controlled and manipulated by “Happinet,” a giant San Francisco tech company that parodies Google and/or Meta.
I should clarify that the protagonists, the ones we’re supposed to root for, are the founders of the startup company that built PresiBot—that is, people who are trying to put the US under the control of a frequently-glitching piece of software that’s also a Republican. For some readers, this alone might be a dealbreaker. But as I already knew Pedro’s ideological convictions, I felt like I had fair warning.
As I read the first couple chapters, my main worry was that I was about to endure an entire novel constructed out of tweet-like witticisms. But my appreciation for what Pedro was doing grew the more I read.
[Warning: Spoilers follow]
To my mind, the emotional core of the novel comes near the end, after PresiBot creator Ethan Burnswagger gets cancelled for a remark that’s judged racially insensitive. Exiled and fired from his own company, Ethan wanders around 2040 San Francisco, and meets working-class and homeless people who are doing their best to cope with the changes AI has wrought on civilization. This gives him the crucial idea to upgrade PresiBot into a crowdsourced entity that continuously channels the American popular will. Citizens watching PresiBot will register their second-by-second opinions on what it should say or do, and PresiBot will use its vast AI powers to make decisions incorporating their feedback. (How will the bot, once elected, handle classified intelligence briefings? One of many questions left unanswered here.) Pedro is at his best when, rather than taking potshots at the libs, he’s honestly trying to contemplate how AI is going to change regular people’s lives in the coming decades.
As for the novel’s politics? I mean, you might complain that Pedro stacks the deck too far in the AI candidate’s favor, thereby spoiling the novel’s central thought experiment, by making the AI’s opponent a human who literally wants to end the United States, killing or expelling most of its inhabitants. Worse, the Republican party that actually exists in our reality—i.e., the one dominated by Trump and his conspiratorial revenge fantasies—is simply dissolved by authorial fiat and replaced by a moderate, centrist party of Pedro’s dreams, a party so open-minded it would even nominate an AI.
Having said all that: I confess I enjoyed “2040.” The plot is tightly constructed, the dialogue crackles (certainly for a CS professor writing a first novel), the satire at least provokes chuckles, and at just 215 pages, the action moves.
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Comment #1 September 1st, 2024 at 4:54 am
If you need to create a fantasy Republican party rather that the real one here and now to push your political views, you’d think you’d have the self-awareness to ask some serious questions of your those political views.
Anyway, what we know of peoples preferences and opinions, hooking up any machine to process it all and attempt some kind of rational summary would lead to even the most god-like AI to have a complete meltdown.
Comment #2 September 1st, 2024 at 11:08 am
From the review, this sounds like it’s a story in the SF subgenre where the individualistic libertarian heroes use a technological advance to defeat the collectivist repressive villains, originally Yellow Peril, later Red Menace, maybe Government Bureaucrats, I guess nowadays Social Justice Wokerriors. Does that characterization sound accurate? How much of that setup one can tolerate in an adventure story is a matter of personal taste. Just don’t confuse either a super-science gadget, OR ranting right-wing reactionary politics, for anything accurate to the real world.
And what is the “American popular will”, at all? What was its position at the relevant times on slavery, or the reason we have “Chief Raging Bull” (i.e. what happened to all those Native Americans), or the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, or Women’s Liberation, or LGBT rights, etc. etc. It there any consideration of questions in that vein? It must be nice to have a sentient AI that always matches one’s assumed-correct views on the issues of the day.
As much as the “AI ethics” people would put me up against the wall too come their revolution, they do have a point about the embedded real political implications. As an example in their favor, it’s pretty hard to beat an AI candidate which is a fantasy technocratic Republican, in contrast to the actually existing “MAGA” Republicans.
Comment #3 September 1st, 2024 at 12:09 pm
Out of curiosity, does the novel have anything to say about the congressional Republican and Democratic parties in 2040?
I find it really weird when people assume that the presidency is everything and congress is a mere footnote.
Comment #4 September 1st, 2024 at 1:26 pm
Seth Finkelstein #2: I’d say that anyone who picks up this book looking for a fair-minded skewering of contemporary American politics (and who isn’t as far right as Pedro himself) is going to be deeply disappointed. The best one can say is that he gets in some very solid satirical digs at wokeism, in the course of an enjoyable story trying to imagine near-future AI. And that the politics are expected for anyone who knows anything about Pedro.
Comment #5 September 1st, 2024 at 1:28 pm
AF #3: As another SPOILER …
the Democrats end up with control of Congress, which means that PresiBot has a difficult job ahead as the novel ends.
Comment #6 September 1st, 2024 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for the warning. (Which is what I heard someone say in a movie theatre many years ago after a preview featuring a screaming comedian.)
Comment #7 September 1st, 2024 at 7:12 pm
Interface, in reverse
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/356864/interface-by-george-neal-stephenson-and-frederick/9780099427759
Comment #8 September 2nd, 2024 at 12:01 pm
“Their side is criminally insane, our side is moderate in a featureless way,” is exactly the sort of view that someone who is themselves moderate and who tended to assume others would be until shown otherwise would naturally take in our attack-focused press landscape. Biased media sources, which have always focused on the negative aspects of their opponents, have reached the point where they don’t engage with their own side at all. A reader would never get the opportunity to find out that some of the things your their side would choose as their best traits imply they are also insane, nor would they hear about traits of or subfactions within the other side that don’t lend themselves to attack.
Comment #9 September 2nd, 2024 at 8:07 pm
Scott#4 – I wasn’t asking for a fair-minded skewering of contemporary American politics, just if there’s any thoughtfulness about the issue of AI and choices about values. I’ve seen some interesting material at times from right-wingers which considers the same problem as the “AI Ethics” people, but approaching it from the opposite perspective. That is, they completely agree that AI systems will contain embedded political values, but they want those to be their (right-wing) values. It’s vaguely like some of the most functionally Marxist analysis of society can be found among businesspeople, except they put capital as the hero, not labor (that’s Aynd Rand’s fiction in a nutshell).
By the way, I presume you know this, but just in case otherwise, you’re quoted on the book’s Amazon page under “Editorial Reviews”:
“I confess I enjoyed 2040. The plot is tightly constructed, the dialogue crackles . . . and at just 215 pages, the action moves.”
— Scott Aaronson, Shtetl-Optimized
Comment #10 September 2nd, 2024 at 9:40 pm
Seth Finkelstein #9: Yes, there’s fairly thoughtful speculation about how AI will affect ordinary people (what will kids aspire to do with their lives? will there still be human truck drivers, just so that there’s someone to blame if the truck crashes? etc) if you’re into that sort of thing.
Comment #11 September 3rd, 2024 at 4:10 am
This should totally be turned into a movie!
Comment #12 September 3rd, 2024 at 4:16 pm
What do you think of https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13687?
Comment #13 September 3rd, 2024 at 7:10 pm
Clarinet #12: It’s exciting! Along with previous works in the past couple years showing the beginnings of fault-tolerance in neutral atoms and trapped ions. Which platform will scale first? It’s a real race.
Comment #14 September 4th, 2024 at 3:28 am
scott:
you should publish your ‘review’ on Amazon, where potential buyers of the book can read it.
Comment #15 September 4th, 2024 at 4:07 am
What about this?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/computer-scientists-prove-that-heat-destroys-entanglement-20240828/
Does it imply a limit to the size of a quantum computer?
Comment #16 September 18th, 2024 at 2:33 pm
Indian government’s ruling right wing party might have already tried implementing something similar this year, in form of data collecting and processing using WhatsApp.
Before election almost everyone in India recieved a whatsapp message asking, what all policies that they would like to be implemented.
The election manifesto was released weeks after the survey was conducted.