“War With The Newts” is an eerily prescient novel from 1934 by a Czech political scientist, about how humans first exploited, and then were eventually subjugated by, sentient amphibians whose intelligence, while initially inferior to humans, developed at a faster rate than human intelligence. Substitute “Artificial Intelligence” for “Newts”, and you have a startlingly chilling allegory of what can go wrong with AI.
The novel traces how the newts, from a chance discovery of a colony on a distant tropical island, grew from circus freakshow exhibits able to just regurgitate parts of newspaper articles (think early language models…. ) to developing a global hostile civilization right under the humans’ noses, and unknown to them, as black box technologies might do. The novel even anticipates the now-familiar emergent abilities of large language models by having the newts acquire mathematics skills.
Meanwhile, the humans, unaware of the danger to mankind, could not agree, until it is too late, over how to handle the alien intelligence, biased by hubris, greed, and more generally, their “humanness”. You might find some issues raised in the novel in well-described AI territory, such as: who is responsible for damage caused by newts, do newts have souls, and who owns the intellectual property of work created by newts.
Written with a broad lens, it is a fascinating, if disturbing, read, right up to its inconclusive ending.
The book can be found on Project Gutenberg.
Leave a Reply