The complexities of plot themes: Tracking the AI story
© Photo by Julie Sielaff
The best stories are so much more complex than the main plot. Just as an example, The Count of Monte Cristo (one of my favorites) might most simply be described as a revenge story. This is a drastic understatement. Subplots range across justice, redemption, transformation, morality, betrayal, love—to name a few. Every time I pick it up again, I find new insights that reflect the current state of my own world and what’s keeping me up at night. Masterful storytelling.
And so it goes with news and the latest “big thing,” for instance artificial intelligence (AI). We think we know…but things are rarely as simple as they seem. And the more nuanced themes often take a while to tease out, particularly in real life. There’s almost always a yes and angle.
In Is human imitation the right goal for technology?*, FT journalist Tej Parikh interviews Erik Brynjolfsson (author, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and more). Brynjolfsson references the Turing Test, designed to identify whether a machine can demonstrate intelligent conversational behavior identical to human conversational behavior. Brynjolfsson goes on to propose this line of thinking has since largely influenced researchers to pursue a replication of human thinking by machines. Pretty standard reading until we are introduced to the secondary theme, the subplot: Replication might very well have been the wrong ambition all along. We might all be better positioned if AI development (and technology development in general) focused on amplifying human capabilities and capacities rather than duplicating them. To quote Parikh, “…imitation risks creating a trap.” I absolutely acknowledge that a determination on whether we’re pursuing the right ambition with AI advancement is far beyond my pay grade. But hats off to the plot twist that opens up an intriguing secondary theme.
More recently, Behind the AI bubble, another tech revolution could be brewing* is an op ed piece by the FT’s Gillian Tett. She calls out recent tech headline announcements such as Nvidia’s recent earnings reveal (since upended by Google’s Gemini 3 release) and the timing-adjacent departure of Meta’s chief scientist, Yann LeCun, to launch his own start-up. She reaches back earlier in the year to recall DeepSeek’s introduction of less expensive, smaller scale AI models—and the possibility of commoditizing LLMs. Which then introduces multiple additional themes by raising questions on current capex spending, the longer-term viability of rapidly scaling associated infrastructure and more. This piece is packed with a lot of deep thinking and strategic perspective about where the industry is headed—with the caveat that it’s all just prediction at this point, reading tea leaves. We simply cannot know. But what keeps it bouncing around in my mind is not the just the red thread she has woven across these events but rather a concluding perspective, “…sometimes it only takes a small event to create a tipping point in sentiment.” Plot twist! When headlines loom large, the real story is often found in more subtle headlines, smaller print and the red thread that ties them together.
For AI and its potential—benefits and issues—I suspect we’re just at the beginning of an epic and nuanced novel.
*Note: Subscription required.
