Do androids dream of electric sheep, asks the title of Philip K. Dick’s influential novel. Dick’s protagonist, Rick Deckard – who makes a living hunting down fugitive androids for the San Francisco police department – in fact owns a black-faced electronic sheep. The flesh-and-blood variety have become a rarity on a planet devastated by war. Real sheep reading this column, however, can go back to safely grazing: our lead reviewer, Michael Wooldridge, thinks that “AI in the physical world … hasn’t progressed”. The latest ChatGPT can critique John Rawls’s theory of justice and itemize the causes of the French Revolution, but, says Wooldridge in his assessment of Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence and George Musser’s Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, “we aren’t anywhere close to having AI tools that can tidy our home and clear the dinner table and load the dishwasher”. Do scientists have their priorities right, dare one ask? More seriously, we seem to be no nearer to answering “the hard problem” formulated by the philosopher David Chalmers – what is human consciousness? If they can’t crack the code of human sentience, how can scientists replicate it in machines?
We probably won’t love androids even if the scientists accomplish that task. Tim Peake’s Space, reviewed by Richard Lea, reminds us that astronauts refused to cede their place in space exploration to robots. The triumph of the human spirit? Maybe. The first Moon landing was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”. But not, initially, for womankind. Loren Grush’s The Six reminds us that the fema
