A posthumous postscript on a hair-raising topic
Was Henry Kissinger an AI “doomer”?
Genesis. By Henry Kissinger, Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt. Little, Brown; 288 pages; $30. John Murray; £22
HENRY KISSINGER kept learning right to the end of his life. In the half-decade before he died in 2023, aged 100, he turned himself into an expert in artificial intelligence (AI), adding to the fields of history, philosophy, cold-war diplomacy and nuclear deterrence that made him a master of 20th-century realpolitik.
Polymaths are rare, as he and his co-authors, Craig Mundie, formerly of Microsoft, and Eric Schmidt, who ran Google, point out in “Genesis”. Humans do not live long enough to master more than a few disciplines. But AI, they say, will be “the ultimate polymath”, pushing the boundaries of discovery, from nanotechnology to outer space, and unconstrained by human fears or biological limitations. The development of AI could be humanity’s highest achievement. Yet it could end up replacing—and subjugating—its own inventors.
This sense of the Promethean power of AI will be familiar to those who have read Kissinger’s previous book on the topic, “The Age of AI”, published in 2021 (Mr Schmidt was a co-author). But “Genesis” is a posthumous postscript, written with more elegance and a darker sense of foreboding than its predecessor, and is as much about humans as about machines. AI, it suggests, is on the verge of a superhuman intelligence, which people will either control or be controlled by. Man’s ability to co-exist with it requires a common understanding of humanity that could be all the more elusive in a polarised world.
The book argues that AI threatens some of mankind’s strongest convictions. People believe in a pecking order: humans, then animals and then machines. AI could vault machines to the top of the hierarchy. People identify by nations, but in the age of AI, sovereign-like power could accrue to the private firms that own and develop AI technology. Work helps shape human identity, but AI will recast the role of labour and the distribution of rewards. Wars will be fought between implacable foes who feel no pain (as a consolation, they may prefer to attack each other’s data centres rather than people). People believe in the power of reason, but still do not understand how large language models reach their conclusions. Is this a “dark enlightenment”, bringing back an age of unexplained, quasi-religious authority?
To assess the extent to which humans will keep hold of their destiny, the book grapples with a choice: should mankind become more like AIs (it often refers to them in the plural), or should AIs become more like people? Its attempt to answer the first question is shallow and unconvincing. It talks of how humans will “co-evolve” with machines via “brain-computer interfaces” and other sci-fi-like forms of neural engineering, in order to create superhumans. But it recoils at the clear risks.
More interesting is the discussion of how people can infuse AI with a sense of human dignity and values. Though “far-from-perfect” models have been let loose on the world, people are learning how to make them safer. As well as ingesting global and local rules and regulations, AI models will learn “doxa”, or unwritten and overlapping human codes that broadly keep humanity stable.
However, it gets trickier when one considers who should decide machines’ sense of right and wrong, their ultimate safety catch. (Some, it is worth remembering, questioned Kissinger’s conscience.) “Genesis” asserts that forging consensus on what human values are and how to invoke them to prevent the most extreme perils of AI is the “philosophical, diplomatic and legal task of the century”.
Kissinger’s last foreign trip was to China, at the invitation of President Xi Jinping, to discuss the many risks humanity faced from AI. From beyond the grave, Kissinger is pointing in the right direction. But it is hard to think of anyone of his statesmanlike stature who will spearhead the necessary world- and generation-spanning conversations in the next few years. ■
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