Under the shadow of Artificial Intelligence

We are all doomed. Or we are all about to enter a science-fiction version of the land of Cockaigne where free stuff rains down from the skies and people can enjoy themselves doing whatever strikes their fancy without having to spend a minute working for pay. Though most of those who are involved in the development of Artificial Intelligence assume that it will have to be one or the other, there is no agreement as to which of the two drastically different futures they envisage is most probable.  

As things stand, the pessimists are making the running. A few days ago, one such, Dario Amodei, the CEO of a multibillion company called Anthropic, warned us that AI is becoming so good at what it does that it could soon destroy human civilisation. Given that it feeds on what has already been thought and done as recorded in the available texts which, needless to say, contain much that is downright horrifying, the unease they feel makes sense. Could AI start programming itself in a malevolent way? Can it be coaxed into taking a philanthropic approach to the problems it is asked to solve? How can you make a machine with a 10-figure IQ obey you? These are the questions the men engaged in pressing ahead – almost all are men – are unable to answer.  

AI is just the latest in the growing list of threats confronting our species. Some that were included several decades back have since been discarded. The “population bomb,” with humankind breeding at such a frantic rate that soon there would be no room left and hundreds of millions would die of starvation, was quickly defused. Instead of multiplying at a suicidal rate, human beings are doing the opposite and refusing to have children. The end result will be much the same. However, worries about other potential “extinction events” that could come about at any moment are still very much with us. The atomic scientists’ “doomsday clock” was just reset at 85 seconds to midnight, presumably in order to tell Donald Trump to stop misbehaving.  Though the notion that we are little more than a minute away from a nuclear winter is certainly disturbing, these days more people fear that global warming is overheating the planet; the most concerned about what they call anthropogenic climate change say that, for us to survive, industry and farming will have to be outlawed.  

Behind all such misgivings can be found the assumption that homo sapiens sapiens has turned out to be far too clever for his own good and would have been well advised to think less and leave nature alone. This is why even members of the technological elite fear that, like Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, they are unleashing forces they will be unable to control; unlike the hapless youth, they cannot pin their hopes on the return of an elderly wizard capable of restoring order.

Can scientific progress be reined in? In theory, it can; in the 15th century, the Ming Dynasty in China stopped sending exploratory fleets of hugely impressive “treasure ships” across the Indian Ocean to Africa after arriving at the conclusion that finding out more about the rest of the world was not worth the trouble. About the same time, Muslim regimes and their ecclesiastical counterparts in Europe also decided that it would be dangerous to let individuals driven by the “lust of knowing what should not be known” delve into matters better left to the religious authorities. 

A similar attitude is being taken by those, among them Elon Musk, who would like to enforce a pause on research into AI until it becomes clear where it was going and what could be done to prevent it from falling into the hands of evildoers or, what would be even worse, from acquiring a mind of its own. Needless to say, the chances of anything like this happening are close to zero. Too many people have convinced themselves that AI is about to become such an immensely powerful tool that governments, and stakeholders in the tech giants, feel that they have no choice but to do their best to master it before anyone else, which is why they are investing colossal sums of money in the business.

According to Amodei, half of all entry-level administrative jobs could be taken over by AI within between one and five years. That may be just a wild guess, but fears that he could be right are making what for many is an already bleak panorama even gloomier. Much the same can be said about the impact on people’s minds of headlong technological progress which may enable billions of men and women to get in touch with one another but also tends to isolate them from those in their immediate vicinity or family.

What is more, by constantly reminding them that AI is much brighter than they are and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise, it is having a dampening effect on creative endeavours. Why bother to write an essay, poem or novel when a chatbot can instantaneously provide you with one that could be far superior to anything you might come up with? In academic institutions throughout the world, students and even professors are letting AI do most of the hard stuff because, after all, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between their own work and that of their cybernetic helpers. To make things even more complicated, AI is creating ghostly entities that lurk behind screens or within humanoid robots; some flesh-and-blood human beings have fallen in love with them. There are also cases of people committing suicide after being induced to do so by a persuasive machine.

Another risk is that the ready availability of apparently all-knowing devices will continue to make people increasingly stupid. Thanks to technology, the attention span of many is shrinking, they read far less than their parents or older siblings and find it harder to add or subtract in their head. It seems that the “Flynn effect,” with young folk’s ability to solve problems rising year after year, a phenomenon that was attributed to improvements in education, nutrition and the requirements of modern urban life, went into reverse a couple of decades ago and that the trend is speeding up. According to some, everything changed in 2007 when Apple brought out the first iPhone. If so, the world’s most successful and most admired company has a lot to answer for.