Artificial intelligence is the talk of the town but how many of us really understand its physics? The book Dream Machine emerged from a serendipitous encounter between Appupen and Laurent Daudet, sparked when Appupen left a comics residency in Angoulême, France, feeling disillusioned. While in Paris for work, he encountered a man who identified himself as an AI scientist. Appupen was struck by the man’s adept use of linguistics in discussing AI, different from how tech experts would generally speak. He admits in a book discussion that ‘nobody ever badmouths tech and everyone’s of the opinion that more tech will save us from bad tech’. Like many others, Appupen did not know a lot about AI and proposed this idea of writing an explainer of a book which targets discerning readers to form their own opinions. The book is in no way a watered-down explanation of a complex issue. It derives itself from a point of ignorance to eventual knowledge about AI’s mechanics and the ethical questions it poses.
August 2024, volume 48, No 8