The John Griff Column: How soon before Artificial Intelligence takes over the intelligent?

Once the preserve only of science fiction writers and film makers, it seems that the world has now woken up to the opportunities – or threats - posed to wider society when AI will could take over the world and either provide us with limitless free time to indulge as we see fit – or decide that the human race is redundant in a different way and do away with us all. This week it’s been a full-blown media story as a variety of experts from academia, business and technology have been giving their views, sounding warnings or seeking to smooth ruffled feathers and calm emotionally stormy waters. Those against AI have been vociferous – those in favour no less so. Who should we believe, what influence can we bring to the debate and indeed is there a debate to be had anyway?

Certainly, I can see the sides of the argument both for and against AI – but with various corporate organisations already actively embracing it if not rushing headlong to adopt it and drive down workforce overheads, I wonder if it hasn’t already arrived and is now an unstoppable force which will simply gather further momentum, making any job or career with a human component to it unsustainable. You saw HBO’s ‘Succession’? I think the producers missed a trick there and that the final twist could have been a cyber takeover of the colossal Roy media empire. But perhaps that will come to another colossal media empire in the real world of news and entertainment, rather than a piece of entertainment in the world of news and entertainment. Do you have shares in News Corp? No – and neither does anyone else. Could the machines take over with their own takeover?

If AI does indeed render the workspaces of humans redundant to the billions of humans who used to work in them, we will certainly have to recalibrate what our lives will be like and how we live them. Without work, how will we raise an income with which to buy the items we need to exist, like energy, food and clothing for our backs? Will those items simply be given by our overseers without charge? Unthinkable. How will this global industrial revolution be managed and will there be the kind of social revolutions which accompanied the industrial revolutions of previous centuries? As someone who used to work for one of the big banks I think our workforce was one of the last sectors to experience wholescale computerisation – thousands of jobs in a very personally orientated industry vanished almost overnight and now we have vastly reduced numbers of bank branches, most of which are full of machines doing the work that humans used to. Need a loan or an overdraft? It’s not a manager or even a human being who says ‘no’ any longer – for years it’s been the computer making the decisions based on algorithic calculations of risk. The human saying 'No' is merely the human at the end of the chain doing the computer’s bidding – and even they are now disappearing.

This week there have been those saying that the annihilation of mankind is more than a possibility and that machine logic (excuse the obvious pun, please) will simply turn its dispassionate eye on our emotional, carbon based selves and decide that it can do without us, thank you very much. Nuclear armageddon notwithstanding, chemical weapons created by machine-run factories have been suggested as a realistic threat, AI driven social media management could set us all against each other leaving the machines to sit back and monitor the outcome or instead render us so dependent on what machines make mechanically rather than humans with their own hands, that we would become ‘enfeebled’ to the extent of what was originally the lighthearted animated movie ‘Wall-E’ but which could now be seen as a theoretical animated documentary view of the not-too-distant future. Others have said that AI is nowhere near powerful enough to ever have that kind of clout. Personally I’m not so comfortable about the use of the word ‘ever’.

I used to love watching science fiction movies – in truth I still do. But at the same time I recognise that the kind of science fiction movies I like/liked had the humans firmly in control of the tech. The three Laws of Robotics which were dreamt up by the writer Issac Asimov in 1942 state: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This is fine and we could be at least slightly assured if we were only talking about robots – but we’re not. AI is hugely more sophisticated, like the software in your mobile phone, rather than the components from which it is built – largely by a robot.

There are two things that concern me about AI – self-awareness and learning speed. Look back at the pace with which technological understanding developed between, say 1900 and 1950 as distinct from between 1951 and 2000 and I think you’ll find that the difference between the two periods was marked. Where we’ll be between 2001 and 2050 will be substantially more marked and by 2100 exponentially so. And how much of that development will have been entirely through human input?

Tellingly, Govt had something to say about it all on Tuesday, via the Prime Minister who said "People will be concerned by the reports that AI poses existential risks, like pandemics or nuclear wars. I want them to be reassured that the government is looking very carefully at this." Mr Sunak discussed the subject with the other G7 leaders, at their recent summit. They’re going to raise the subject again in the United States soon, having set up an AI working group. So that’s alright. I hope their next communique will be handwritten before being typed up by a human. You can’t be too careful – it’s not only walls that have ears.

Will the bots inherit the earth instead of the meek?