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Reviewed by Jon Michael Miller for Readers' Favorite
Salvatore Cataudella’s The Noema Field: Explorations in Consciousness is a magnificent prose poem narrative. The author uses computer-savvy technical language imaginatively to offer hope that the dilemma of the AI world we are entering can eventually solve the challenge of creating AI systems that have moral consciences. Many of us envision machines and methodologies involving heartless robots in the hands of criminals and dictators. Using a Zen koan (riddle) as a starting point in which an enlightened being causes the death of another living creature, the author foreshadows the development of an ethically aware living AI, thus joining humans with human-like machines. He creatively uses a poetic structure, using line length, italics, capitalization, bold lettering, and white space to give his story and scenes a poetic “feel.” To create emphasis, he uses varied line endings. The shapes of the lines on the page create a sense of airy openness, making the story move like clouds in the sky.
The result of Cataudella’s encouraging piece made me shed some of my pessimistic view of where AI is leading us. Though his view of giving AI beings moral consciences is centuries away, his technical knowledge and writing skills were almost like a meditation. I even learned some words I didn’t know—koan, noema, heuristic, for instance. And his constant repetition—not this, not that, not the other thing, but something else—had a mantra effect and told me that this story is proposing is an entirely new awareness, not of good or bad, but of simple being, a state before action; a respect for Being as a state that unifies all things. The Noema Field by Salvatore Cataudella is a must-read for anyone concerned about the path on which AI technology is headed.