Football, AI, and the Genie in the Bottle

It’s Finals time

The AFL Grand Final is played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground every year, apart from the COVID years when Melbourne wasn’t available. It’s one of those fixtures that seems carved into the national calendar. The last Saturday in September means football at the MCG.

This year, neither team comes from Victoria.

Brisbane is playing Fremantle. Brisbane has reached the Grand Final for the fourth year in a row and is hoping for a threepeat. Fremantle is chasing its first premiership.

Freo is my second team. My first is West Coast. Both clubs are based in Perth, and I’m loyal to the core.

Peter, on the other hand, is a tart when it comes to football clubs. Over the years, his allegiance has wandered from Melbourne to Sydney and now to Brisbane. No doubt he’ll be cheering enthusiastically for the Lions and pretending this latest attachment is lifelong and sacred.

What makes this Grand Final particularly entertaining is the distance involved. Both teams come from cities thousands of kilometres from Melbourne, yet their supporters will descend on the MCG in enormous numbers.

The airlines will put on extra flights and make a killing. Fares will rise with the enthusiasm of a full-forward taking a mark in front of goal. Hotels will fill. Other supporters will make the long drive, setting off days before the match and turning the journey into part of the occasion.

And despite the absence of a Victorian team, the MCG will be packed. Of course, it’s a well-known fact that Melbourne will turn out for a hard-fought game of tiddly-winks. And a grand final is a grand final, after all.

Brisbane does have Melbourne roots. The Brisbane Lions emerged from the merger of the Brisbane Bears and Fitzroy, so plenty of die-hard Fitzroy supporters will be there in their old colours, cheering for the descendants of their club.

As for me, I’m too busy working on a story to take much notice. I’ll turn on the television now and then to check the score, especially if Fremantle is winning.

Which brings me, by a slightly crooked route, to artificial intelligence.

The rise of AI

The book I’m writing features Morgan Selwood, a cyborg with a supercomputer embedded in her human brain. She’s still entirely herself, still all woman, but she has an extraordinary ability to interact with computer systems.

I created Morgan more than twenty years ago, when I was still working in IT. Back then, some readers might have found her abilities difficult to believe. She could connect with computers, understand complex systems almost instantly, and break through electronic defences.

Now, as so often happens with science fiction, reality is beginning to catch up.

AI can analyse vast quantities of information, write computer code, find patterns, identify weaknesses, and help people gain access to systems. It’s a wonderful tool. I use it, and while it can be infuriatingly wrong at times, I’m constantly impressed by what it can do. But it needs controls.

Without them, the dystopian futures imagined in stories such as Terminator become less absurd. The possibility of machines escaping human control is also part of Morgan’s history. In her universe, Supertechs were created to prevent the machines from taking over again.

That history lies behind the central idea in Morgan’s Choice. Morgan is a Supertech, but she isn’t a machine and she isn’t anybody’s property. And because she’s human, she isn’t anti-human. And people like her come with certain controls.

As the logline says, she’s part machine, all woman, and nobody’s tool.

The AI genie is out of the bottle. We can’t force it back in, and trying to stop development altogether would simply give everybody else (China, Russia) a head start. AI is far too useful to abandon.

Perhaps the best comparison is fire. Without fire, human civilisation would have been impossible. It gave us warmth, cooked food, metalworking, industry, and eventually much of the world we live in.

But let it escape our control and it becomes a ferocious destroyer.

AI is much the same. The answer isn’t to ban it or pretend it doesn’t exist. The answer is to use it, understand it, and make very sure we remain in charge.

Morgan Selwood would certainly agree. You can meet her and her seriously yummy alien admiral here.