Now is the time to read Jurassic Park.
Like most of the world, I was very familiar with the spectacular film by Stephen Spielberg and the subsequent sequels, which were often more miss than hit. I saw the book as a cheap paperback that you would buy at the airport before a flight, read a little then discard. Perhaps interesting in ideas but lacking in much else. No need to read it when I've seen the movie.
I was wrong. The characters and plot were slightly different yet fitting. The prose was lively and fun. Readability was a warm welcome from books that often slog through dialogue, action, and science. And while there were bits, particularly the DNA explanation from Dr. Henry Wu and computer code from John Arnold, that were a bit straining, it did not hamper my enjoyment of the scene or book. It brought me deeper into the world of Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park is about today as much as it was about the future then. It is about AI as much as it was about dinosaurs then. It is about progress, entertainment, responsibility, men of power, guard rails, shortsightedness, and our small place on planet Earth now as it was then.
In Jurassic Park, we see companies and money flowing toward new technology with the simply thought of profit. There is little regard for safety and the effect on the wider world, and an arrogance that humans are in control of the things that we build.
The dinosaurs, pulled away from millions of years of extinction, are aliens. Alien to our present-day, man-made structures, and Mother Nature who evolved as they died out. Most glaringly they are alien to us. Humanity.
The struggles of scientists and laymen alike to take them seriously (and as more than oversized lizards) is frustrating to read. But the frustration is necessary. It places squarely into the minds of the wider world who do not take the changes of our world seriously.
We can stand here after several Jurassic Park movies and say how foolish the characters were, however, they were just experiencing the new genetic technology and the living fossils at that moment. Each having insight and each having blind spots into what dinosaurs in the modern world meant.
As I watch AI grow more, infiltrating every aspect of entertainment in our world, impacting much more beyond that, I wonder which character am I? Where are my insights? And where are my blindspots? I don't know, and I doubt I will. The best I can hope for is some luck and bravery as we traverse the paradigm shift caused by men with far more money and ego than sense.
The second best I can hope for is the insight of Dr. Ian Malcolm. That the world cannot be controlled and sometimes it's best to just let it go while you go along your merry way.