It took me a long while to appreciate the British novelist Julian Barnes. This is probably because he was one of my professors, and I was never quite sure what to make of them. Barnes was doing the 1995–96 year at Johns Hopkins, pretty much at the height of his early fame — after the publication of Flaubert’s Parrot (which won the Booker Prize) and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and amid the juicy feud with his fellow novelist (and now former friend) Martin Amis, who’d fired his agent, Barnes’s wife, immediately before securing a half-million-pound advance for his next book. That was about all I knew before I signed up for his fiction workshop. I didn’t have the time or inclination to read his work because, frankly, his reputation made him seem a little stuffy.

He lived up to that in the classroom, too. As I remember, he chafed at the indulgent American-ness of his students’ collective work, which was an issue for me because I was mostly writing about the experience of being a disaffected teenager. At one point, he asked us all please not to write about Taco Bell again, pronouncing the first word with a hard British A in which you could hear the scowl. I felt personally attacked.

It took me two more decades to start reading him and to understand his brilliance. Barnes may be a Francophile, but he’s hardly stuffy or effete. In fact, his characters are frequently earthy, sinful, real. They are born confused and remain confused, only occasionally chancing on enlightenment and often failing to recognize it. In more recent books like A Sense of an Ending, The Only Story, and Elizabeth Finch, he shapes plots with the utmost gentleness, building stories that last characters’ entire lives until they culminate in quiet devastation. His themes — mortality, memory, history — are ones that hit home for me. (That’s Trying!’s raison d’être right there.) He’s also pretty damn funny.

I haven’t yet read all of his work, and I’m not going through it systematically. I’m prolonging my encounter with his books, so that I won’t run out of them too soon. (His book Departure(s), released in January, is said to be his final work.) But recently I picked up Staring at the Sun, his 1986 novel that tracks the life of an English woman named Jean Serjeant, from her 1920s childhood to her unhappy marriage to her unconventional motherhood to, eventually, her life in England in the 2020s, as she nears 100 years of age.

It’s in that last section that Barnes is startlingly prescient. He imagines the creation of what is essentially a national Wikipedia-slash-AI chatbot system — the General Purposes Computer, or GPC, accessed not at home but through library-like HQs:

Consider how much Barnes got right here! The scraping of all cultural output, the conflict between what knowledge is correct and real and what is hypothesized and fantasized, the trivial use cases, the individual algorithmic adaptations, the traumatic psychosis — this is the tale of our past five years, as AI technology has come to dominate our intellectual and emotional lives. And it was written 35 years beforehand.

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Barnes’s GPC isn’t quite identical to, say, today’s ChatGPT or Claude. It’s not as verbose, for one. It tends to speak in shorthand computerese. When Jean’s son, George, asks GPC, “Why is the mink excessively tenacious of life?” it responds with “Not real question.” To other questions, it might say, simply, “Modify” or “Repeat.” But it certainly contains “fact,” like how long it takes to electrocute a mink (2.3 seconds).

As GPC pervades society, users become suspicious. People imagine secret hacks, tricky lies, to get better answers, to circumvent GPC’s programming. Those who ask “dubious questions” might get picked up by the police afterward. Access to all things known to people breeds conspiratorial thinking. Is it all things or all things they’ll let us know? This culminates in the legend of The Absolute Truth (TAT), an information category which a user must, it is said, submit an application to access.

TAT, it turns out, speaks in the same computerese as GPC, with perhaps a little more brio. But what’s special about TAT is that it does deal with what Barnes’s countryman Douglas Adams called “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” I.e., why? Why was I born, why am I living, why will I die, what should I do about any of it? In Staring at the Son, it’s George who applies for, and is granted, an audience with TAT, to ask just those questions. Their conversation is roundabout, to say the least:

Barnes’s big joke here is not about the inability of a state-sponsored Wikipedia AI chatbot to solve humanity’s existential dilemmas. It’s that the “chatbot” isn’t actually a chatbot at all — it’s human workers on the other end, pretending to be computers and typing in “Not real question” by hand! In a brief scene, we see two of them discussing George’s persistence in his GPC interactions:

Now, it’s one thing to visualize Wikipedia and AI chatbots decades in advance. New York Magazine just published a feature on Hans Moravec, a Carnegie Mellon roboticist who, in 1988, published a book, Mind Children, that predicted computer intelligence would exceed human intelligence in 40 years, or right around now. (I remain skeptical.) And all the way back in 1952, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in his novel Player Piano was imagining that computers and automation would take over most jobs, robbing humanity of meaningful work and existence.

But to imagine not only that we’d have a sophisticated, computerized, “democratic” repository of knowledge and wisdom but that the sophistication, computerization, and access would be fake? That’s genius, because that’s what’s happened: Companies hawking AI have been shown time and again to be relying on intelligent meat, from the overseas workers identifying shoppers’ purchases in Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” stores to the humans supervising driverless Waymo taxis. The myth Barnes is puncturing isn’t the easy one that we’re handing over our brains and our choices to robots — it’s that we know the robots can’t do it either, so we won’t let them, and instead we’ll lie to ourselves about the progress we’ve made, even though it’s no progress at all. Consulting GPC, or GPT, is as productive as staring at the sun.

The last strange thing to note here is that, as far as I can tell, no one else has written about this. Perhaps it’s because Staring at the Sun isn’t Barnes’s best-known work — new readers will go first for his classics, and then for the recent hits, while minor successes like this one go neglected. Or perhaps, coming out just two years after William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Barnes’s vision of our computer-assisted future wasn’t sexy or violent enough to capture the imagination. But in my reading, his is the most accurate prediction, because it’s based not on what computers are capable of but on how humans delude themselves into trusting those machines.

So, good work, Julian Barnes! Your reward, should you ever wind up in Brooklyn with time to kill, is dinner on me. I’m thinking… Taco Bell? 🪨🪨🪨