Book Review: “2040” by Pedro Domingos
Pedro Domingos is a computer scientist at the University of Washington. I’ve known him for years as a guy who’d confidently explain to me why I was wrong about everything from physics to CS to politics … but then, for some reason, ask to meet with me again. Over the past 6 or 7 years, Pedro has become notorious in the CS world as a right-wing bomb-thrower on what I still call Twitter—one who, fortunately for Pedro, is protected by his tenure at UW. He’s also known for a popular book on machine learning called The Master Algorithm, which I probably should’ve read but didn’t.
Now Pedro has released a short satirical novel, entitled 2040. The novel centers around a presidential election between:
- The Democratic candidate, “Chief Raging Bull,” an angry activist with 1/1024 Native American ancestry (as proven by a DNA test, the Chief proudly boasts) who wants to dissolve the United States and return it to its Native inhabitants, and
- The Republican candidate, “PresiBot,” a chatbot with a frequently-malfunctioning robotic “body.” While this premise would’ve come off as comic science fiction five years ago, PresiBot now seems like it could plausibly be built using existing LLMs.
This is all in a near-future whose economy has been transformed (and to some extent hollowed out) by AI, and whose populace is controlled and manipulated by “Happinet,” a giant San Francisco tech company that parodies Google and/or Meta.
I should clarify that the protagonists, the ones we’re supposed to root for, are the founders of the startup company that built PresiBot—that is, people who are trying to put the US under the control of a frequently-glitching piece of software that’s also a Republican. For some readers, this alone might be a dealbreaker. But as I already knew Pedro’s ideological convictions, I felt like I had fair warning.
As I read the first couple chapters, my main worry was that I was about to endure an entire novel constructed out of tweet-like witticisms. But my appreciation for what Pedro was doing grew the more I read.
[Warning: Spoilers follow]
To my mind, the emotional core of the novel comes near the end, after PresiBot creator Ethan Burnswagger gets cancelled for a remark that’s judged racially insensitive. Exiled and fired from his own company, Ethan wanders around 2040 San Francisco, and meets working-class and homeless people who are doing their best to cope with the changes AI has wrought on civilization. This gives him the crucial idea to upgrade PresiBot into a crowdsourced entity that continuously channels the American popular will. Citizens watching PresiBot will register their second-by-second opinions on what it should say or do, and PresiBot will use its vast AI powers to make decisions incorporating their feedback. (How will the bot, once elected, handle classified intelligence briefings? One of many questions left unanswered here.) Pedro is at his best when, rather than taking potshots at the libs, he’s honestly trying to contemplate how AI is going to change regular people’s lives in the coming decades.
As for the novel’s politics? I mean, you might complain that Pedro stacks the deck too far in the AI candidate’s favor, thereby spoiling the novel’s central thought experiment, by making the AI’s opponent a human who literally wants to end the United States, killing or expelling most of its inhabitants. Worse, the Republican party that actually exists in our reality—i.e., the one dominated by Trump and his conspiratorial revenge fantasies—is simply dissolved by authorial fiat and replaced by a moderate, centrist party of Pedro’s dreams, a party so open-minded it would even nominate an AI.
Having said all that: I confess I enjoyed “2040.” The plot is tightly constructed, the dialogue crackles (certainly for a CS professor writing a first novel), the satire at least provokes chuckles, and at just 215 pages, the action moves.