SunDog

Nick explains the motivation behind SunDog:

“Inspiration for this book came out of StillReel, a web platform for digital art I developed some years ago after researching the fi eld and engaging with over a hundred digital and generative artists. The experience simultaneously gave me an appreciation for the fascinating complexity of the fi eld, and where this complexity could lead to in the future.

When I started writing this book back in 2016, AI was still a very underground endeavour. I was interested in the idea of the singularity, popularised by Vernor Vinge in 1983, that when an AI becomes superintelligent, the future would fundamentally become incomprehensible to humans.

I thought it possible that an art AI could have the potential to reach what is now called artificial general intelligence (AGI), and I wanted to explore what that world could look like as a computer reached sentience and got closer to this event horizon. I wanted to take a small peek over the edge, into this black hole of superintelligence and report back to the reader what I saw.”