AI is bringing to life old stories about mountain tops. Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey want us to go to Tolkien’s Erebor – a land where hobbits and dwarves find refuge and a land of treasures, beauty, and safety. But perhaps we are heading to Erewhon, the mountain-top land that Samuel Butler wrote about in 1871, in the first literary treatment of AI. Erewhonian worships beauty and nature and aims to keep AI and machines locked out because they have ravaged humanity. Which star is humanity ...
