Victor Reetham is a tech billionaire with a plan to “create an AI clone of himself, live forever, and conquer the world.”
He exploits cops, hires mercenaries, shoots down planes, and does whatever it takes to achieve his goals. That is, if you believe William Swain, the narrator of Business Insider founder Henry Blodget’s new page-turner, “The Upgrade.”
It may be familiar. Executives are creating their own twin AIs. They seek the fountain of youth through peptides, plasma infusions, and biohacking. There is a sense of fatalism surrounding AI, and its leaders are surrounded by conspiracy theories. Don’t ask the old man in the tinfoil hat about Peter Thiel.
Mr. Blodgett rose to fame during the dot-com era, when the growth of the Internet sent stock prices soaring and wallets bulging. “It’s incredibly similar, except it basically has three zeros at the end,” Blodgett said. “The numbers are staggering.”
His book is a way to consider all this money and pessimism. CEOs get rich while extolling the risks that AI could pose: the extinction of the workforce, the elimination of truth, and the destruction of humanity. These early stockholders are also the ones warning of a “permanent underclass.”
“The stakes are high,” Blodgett said. “In fiction, that’s the perfect canvas to work on.”
Broget said he wanted to write the book himself but allowed Claude to give him feedback.
“The Upgrade” follows Swain, a former billionaire CEO who grew up with and later competed with Reetham, a wealthy man. He knows Reetham’s evil intentions. The idea is to create an AI super-being, put yourself on top of it, and rule over humanity. Swain must thwart Reetham’s plans and convince the police that he is not the real bad guy.
Mr. Blodgett is an analyst and journalist at heart and spent many years on Wall Street before starting this publication. Blodgett will step down as CEO of Business Insider in 2023 and retire from the company’s board in 2024.
He once earned a master’s degree in fiction from New York University and published a short story 20 years ago, he said. Blodgett thought that this moment needed a form. Blodgett said that high-tech nonfiction has a “depth of life” that is difficult to access, and that life is what writing in the age of AI needs.
In the early stages of writing, Blodgett said a friend called him an “idiot” for not using AI to write his novel.
“I have no doubt that Claude, ChatGPT and others will one day write a really good book,” he said. “For me, I actually wanted to write it. What was important was to execute it.”
He still used AI in the editing process. When Claude said he was getting bored, he cut the early hospital scene short. He also asked Claude to “fact-check” the book to make sure there were no contradictions in his ideas.
Some of the feedback from Claude was “terrible” and that he misremembered plot points. Still, Blodgett isn’t shy about using AI, even as he writes about how it could destroy the world.
“It takes humans seven hours to read a book,” Blodgett says. “It’s amazing to do it in 17 seconds.”
Claude’s book review, “unforgettable,” is displayed on the cover of this book.
On the cover of “The Upgrade,” AI chatbot Claude calls Henry Bloget’s book “unforgettable.” henry blodgett
AI twin and data center
Some content in “The Upgrade” is completely fictional. After all, Blodgett added a new element to the periodic table. Some, he said, are painstakingly realistic, such as long explanations about data centers and definitions of consciousness.
And somewhere in between, realistic but not yet achievable. Swain loses his daughter Rune before the book begins. When Reetham creates a surreal AI version of her, Swain spends much of the novel trying to save his digital daughter from a second death.
“We already have a pretty sophisticated twin AI,” Blodgett said. “Nobody’s thinking, ‘Hey, that’s a conscious being,’ but that’s not a huge leap.”
Many of us live in this in-between world. Technology leaders are making big promises about the coming onslaught of AI and telling us to prepare for a world we’ve never seen before. This cemented AI’s status as highly unpopular. Graduates boo the mention of AI at graduation ceremonies, and Americans would rather live near a nuclear reactor than a data center.
“There’s a wave of visceral hostility toward AI right now,” Blodgett said. He called the employment doomsday theory unfounded, but said the general pessimism was “completely understandable”.
So how do you read a novel about an AI supervillain in an age of AI hatred?This is not a doomsday novel, Blodgett said. He pointed to the novel’s happy ending and Swain’s unexpected connection with his AI daughter.
“There’s also some very optimistic AI here,” he says.
But there’s a reason Blodgett published “The Upgrade” first, rather than a prequel to the space race novel about Swain’s origins that was sitting on a bookshelf. This speaks to that moment.
“This is something that is very, potentially horrifying and dangerous, but also miraculous,” Blodgett said. “We don’t yet know what will happen in the end.”