AI on Trial

A review of Matt Bucher's novella The Belan Deck

Belan, the chairman and CEO of a technology company about to unleash an artificial intelligence wants a PowerPoint presentation that justifies his company’s efforts, defines the customer journey and places what seems to be a powerful artificial intelligence into the market. The author of this presentation, who we meet at San Francisco International Airport, just wants to get home to his wife in Austin. He is a corporate communications guy. With this presentation, his job is on the line.

He needs his job.

But he needs much more than that.

The PowerPoint deck (the comms guy will not touch Google Docs) is sprawling to hundreds of slides snd represents a kind of human freeform consciousness that no AI would ever mimic as facts (trivia) and observations are leaked to the reader in short, aphoristic paragraphs. We never see the deck or get to read its contents directly, but we have a good idea about what is in it. The Belan Deck hits the reader much like Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise, which is written like a decision-tree where a beleaguered employee tries to reach his supervisor at just the right moment to win better compensation. In both short books (The Perec is an excerpt from the longer Life, a User’s Manual) the authors subvert corporate speak to unearth deeper truths about being human.

One tension in The Belan Deck is that Belan doesn’t think much about humanity. You get the sense that he looks forward to the rise of AI overlords as rational decision makers who will set things right in the world. When confronted with the possibilities that AI could be callous, cruel or evil, he responds simply that they should be programmed not to be. As our author tells us:

“The ethics of machine learning imply machines built by flawed humans.

But one day humans will succeed in making humans irrelevant.”

There is a numbered passage detailing the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and its forebear agencies in supporting and funding publishers ad magazines like The Paris Review to spread the values of western culture through art during the 20th century. Nothing, it seems, is as free or pure as we imagine. Why would an AI be any different?

We learn a good deal about the author’s story — he would have been a creative writer, if not for economic necessity and he now wonders, “What is the value and utility of a lifetime of reading?” But the book seems to answer that question with its associations, freely jumping from topics like the economic travails of James Joyce to coincidences of births and deaths in the lives of people like Barack Obama, evoking the joy of falling down an internet rabbit hole and reading wherever the words and links take you. This is a distinctly human activity. AI might parse the whole internet to generate answers that humans can understand but that process means nothing. The AI connects words and ideas according to an algorithm and produces a product. There is no joy of discovery and no sense of the ideas pulling the AI in this direction or that, as there is no consciousness to make note of such a sensation.

“Dave once told me that the generation raised by the internet is in trouble because their grasp of culture is increasingly fragmented.

The implication being that this is bad.

We pick up scraps from Wikipedia, Twitter, various links and rabbit holes, leading us to piece together lopsided images, subjective at best, of what’s out there and what has been.”

It’s no wonder that a generation raised on fragmentation would embrace technology that parses the sum total of human knowledge, looking for connections without a thought toward underlying meaning, treating everything a human can know with no more reverence than a stock trader who cares only for tickers and price momentum.

The Belan Deck is infectious, funny, curious and sometimes disturbing. It is deeply philosophical, but never hectoring. It could be read in an hour or two, but you’ll want to savor it, so read it in discrete bursts.

Another fun side effect, given its talk of Wikipedia and the Internet, is that some of the observations will send you to Google because you’ll just have to know what the erudite Bucher is referring to.

All in all, it’s a triumph of a small book and well worth your consideration.