Visions of the future: On this year’s Booker Prize

A defining feature of the world today is that knowledge is proliferating and societies are struggling to agree on what is happening. AI models have significantly catalysed this devolution, allowing bad actors to flood spaces ranging from the research literature to public airwaves with questionable information, and drawing the attention of governments worldwide to the security implications of such a potent technology.

The Booker Prize for M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything, a novel about a sense-defying alien invasion and the unsettling prospect of un-understandability it confronts humans with, effectively acknowledges the centrality of the AI question both through the book’s substance and the judges’ choice.

A consequence of rampant AI use has been an assault on people’s attention span as well as the ability to make sense of new claims, so much so that reliable, verifiable meaning has become a premium entity. The novel, on the other hand, attempts to diagnose a post-meaning world in which people are only left to look inward.