It’s a hot summer day and I’m carrying a lot of big ideas in my head. I’m thinking about Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI) and how he has made a pact to eat the world, how he promises every day that the new GPT-XYZ is twenty times more something than the last. I’m thinking about how Altman tosses around his idea of AI God and tells us it’s right around the corner, the rapture is almost here, and I’m looking at this app on my phone and wondering how the singularity will miraculously evolve from a kind-hearted and somewhat intoxicated customer service agent. “Hi! It’s ChatGPT,” she says, and a rift opens up beneath me and we all are consumed by the magma, melted and merged as the army of STAPLES-bots recycle us into towering stacks of copy paper.
Right now it seems like the most existential threat is this hot and sticky air, so thick that I have to wade through it on my way to the library.
I’m looking through the section for recent additions and I see this book with a cover that could itself be an AI startup: a braided hexagonal figure eight that folds into itself evoking extra-dimensionality. The cover reads, “Notes on Infinity” — and then — “A novel” — finally; — “Austin Taylor”.
First, I want to unpack “A novel”. Notes on Infinity is certainly bound into a book, it’s 400 pages long, and it’s written in long-form prose organized into chapters. However, I would hesitate to call it a novel. The book falls short in selling me on the richness of each character, it doesn’t build a world where you can feel the wood of the desks and the grit of the bricks. Other reviews before mine have pointed out that one of the two main characters has only two chapters that actually tell us his life story, located at the very end of the book. This is all true.
Yet, before you hop on the bus and toss your copy down that big blue metal chute, I want to consider whether or not Notes on Infinity wants to be a novel-novel. I could critique the romance at the heart of the story in the same way I could critique Christopher Nolan’s Tenet for having an unnamed protagonist. In my opinion, Notes on Infinity gives us a cautionary tale — the details are not so important as the message. It’s a story that tells us something we already know, but it’s something we need to hear again and again. It’s a fairy tale that we have forgotten but it replays itself around us.
There’s a Notes on Infinity where Ursula is a drag queen, and there is one where the little mermaid becomes sea foam. There’s a Notes on Infinity about Zoe and Jack, two young college students struck by love and the beauty of discovery, who forget the most critical step that Richard Feynman would call the first principle of good science, “You must not fool yourself, you are the easiest person to fool.”
In this way, there is a version of Notes on Infinity, not the Disney adaptation but the Hans Christian Andersen edition, where we watch as billions in startup money are funneled and papers are written with data and methods that lie behind closed doors. We watch as promises reach biblical proportions and money circulates with hellish velocity. And in the end, it will all turn into sea foam.
While Notes on Infinity is written by a new author and lacks the refinement and craft of other books, it’s telling us a story that we need to hear in the age of AI. It spins a tragic fairy tale where science meets capital, where truth meets ambition, and where love comes at the expense of everyone else. Notes on Infinity may not have stolen my heart, but it most certainly took my breath away.
Sam Knight is a Sophomore Computer Science major who enjoys exploring the strange intersections of technology, philosophy, and literature. They can be reached at sknight2@ithaca.edu