GR – Artificial Intelligence: your vision seems very poignant and provocative. Has the recent developments of AI of the last two years changed something in your vision?
Ali Blank (Olena Sibiriakova): My vision of AI hasn’t changed much since I started working on the book. AI is a high-functioning computer machine capable of automatically recognizing various kinds of information (for example, images, words, and algorithms), processing, and analyzing it. Over the past two years, the problem of ethical and practical aspects of implementing AI into everyday life has become more relevant and pressing. This is why the first edition of the book included excerpts from Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Professor Nick Bostrom (2014. Audible Inc.), where he considered the progress of AI as a threat to the current social world order.

Can artificial intelligence minimize aggression and violence in humans and reduce the need for warfare was one of the key questions I had as the author of the book. In the second edition, I expanded the AI’s (which is female in the book) capacity scope by including modeling various threats that the program identifies (recognizes) and warns by all possible means. Terrorism, dictatorship, violence, and even climate change were among those threats.

GR – Ukraine tragedy. Famously, the great German poet Rilke used to give advice to a young poet. How would you suggest an artist or innovator react to this overwhelming historical event?
Ali Blank: Rilke was addressing poets, capable of an artistic action and creation of texts-metaphors. Feelings and reactions to the current events are exactly what is missing in the software world, which is winning over masses’ sympathy. For recent generations, these tragic events are best expressed through film dramas or computer games. A text (of the book) as an instrument of influence on the mass consciousness has now transformed into something rudimentary. Modern society has become a society of autism, literature has become an appendage to the video-entertainment industry, and reading books has become an eccentricity.

Creative authorities of the modern world have to appeal not to poets, but to innovators who construct new realities and have mastered digital and media technologies: designers, engineers, politicians, finance experts, and architects.

If I had to answer the question about a German-speaking poet who inspired me, I would name Erich Maria Remarque, and not Rilke. During the First World War, he spent only 50 days on the front, and during the Second, he created only two novels: All Quiet on the Western Front and Borrowed Life. But it turned out to be more than enough to describe the poetics of War.

GR – Has Stanley Kubrick’s vision of a ‘supreme intelligence form of power’ hidden in 2001: Space Odyssey been an influence to your ‘God turned AI’ vision?
Ali Blank: We all are curious about the premise of God and the concept of ultimate power. I think Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, which served as a base for Kubrick’s film, was more of an influence for me. It was American science fiction humanists: Simak, Heinlein, and Bradbury, who worked with notions of the “divine principle” and “machine world” and had always stayed on the side of Humanity that influenced my “God turned AI” vision. Most of them (except Ursula Le Guin) were men, which is probably why it didn’t occur to them to explore a female essence, endowed with super-power and super-intelligence, solving the task of keeping the peace and balance on Earth with the speed of a quantum computer.

Having worked on the second edition of Transition Keeper: Monologies of the New Babylon, I invite you to encourage discourse on world events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic. They are the reason why Transition Keeper: Monologies of the New Babylon now has a new niche to re-comprehend and rethink modern reality, which contains only threats, according to the German philosopher Gumbrecht.

As an author, if I were to summarize Transition Keeper: Monologies of the New Babylon in a single line, I would choose: “What would mankind be like if GOD, that was a Woman, decided to turn into a machine?” In the end, I want to ask you: what would happen if, one day, God turns into AI? Will we accept the change and alter our beliefs or rebel against it?