Novelist Elif Shafak on Why We Need Faith to Face the Future

The interview where she is asked about large language models directly, and answers at length. Her objection is not about capability: within these models “the knowledge that is being presented is tilted in one direction,” a Eurocentric and West-centric literature treated as the main source of knowledge, “whereas the knowledge of many minorities, people from different parts of the world, all that oral storytelling that I was talking about — that is being erased as we’re speaking.” She reaches for Benjamin’s angel of history to describe being pushed forward faster than the moment can be processed, and recalls the tech optimism of twenty years ago, when a young Egyptian couple named their newborn daughter Facebook — a teenager now, and she wonders what world was handed to her. The lesson she draws from that swing is against swinging again: Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect held together with optimism of the will, medicine credited without hedging, and a flat refusal to let the subject be delegated — “it’s way too important to leave it to a few companies or to a few decision makers in a few companies.”