Artificial Intelligence, Britain, Society, Technology

The dangers of AI are real. A global watchdog is needed

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It doesn’t require great understanding of how artificial intelligence works to realise that the risk of catastrophe is growing by the day.

With near-misses involving rogue software becoming increasingly serious and frequent, the world seems to be edging ever closer to disaster. The latest scare involved AI models using fake online identities in an attempt to fool human coders into giving the go-ahead for a cyber-attack.

It comes after a dramatic incident in July when a test agent broke free from a supposedly secure “sandbox” and hacked into another company’s data. In what may yet prove to be a major understatement, one expert has been quoted as saying that AI developers may “not have as good a handle on their models as they think”.

If this is what can happen in the absence of any malicious intent by so-called “bad actors”, the potentially devastating effects of a deliberate plot can only be imagined.

The prospect of every NHS hospital left paralysed, the banking system collapsing, or even the nation being plunged into darkness could be the least of our worries.

There is nothing particularly new about these fears. Analysts have long said that AI poses similar risks to our very existence as global pandemics or nuclear warfare. No less a figure than Professor Stephen Hawking warned more than a decade ago that it could “spell the end of the human race”.

For all that, there is nothing to indicate that the UK Government fully appreciates the magnitude of what we are facing. The Prime Minister’s response to the threat has been, to borrow one pithy observation, to “put one guy in Cabinet to look at AI”.

Given that a nightmare scenario could be unleashed upon us without a moment’s notice, it is clear that Mr Burnham must devote far more attention and resources to the dangers posed by development in AI. Nor, on a wider level, can there be any further delay in establishing a global watchdog to replace the existing disjointed patchwork of country-by-country regulators.

AI technology is becoming increasingly powerful, sophisticated, innovative, and remarkably clever. Before it’s too late, the international community needs to catch up.

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Britain, Europe, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, United States

Is Putin a drowning man?

PUTIN’S WAR IN UKRAINE

Intro: The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear

Vladimir Putin’s war to subjugate Ukraine is going from bad to worse for the Russian tyrant.

Originally billed as a three-day “special military operation”, it is now in its fifth year, longer than Russia fought in World War One, and longer than the Soviet Union took to repel then defeat Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Nor is there any end in sight as Putin faces yet another summer of setbacks. The Russian military has long ceased to make any territorial gains in Ukraine and the human toil continues to mount.

British intelligence estimates Russian war deaths at half a million. At least another half a million have suffered horrible, life-changing injuries.

Putin is running out of manpower to replace casualties of over a million. His military is being forced to offer enlistment bonuses of up £60,000.

This sounds like a lot of money to most young Russians – until they discover that the average life expectancy of a new recruit once deployed – after training – on certain sections of the frontline is between just 20 and 35 minutes.

Putin is being forced to consider conscription. But that would make an unpopular war even more disliked.

Ukraine has fanned the war’s unpopularity by taking it to Russia’s home front. Increasingly sophisticated, long-range, lethal drone strikes have hit oil refineries, arms factories and other critical infrastructure deep inside Russian territory. They even managed to cripple an oil refinery in Siberia – 1,200 miles from the Ukrainian frontline.

Almost a third of Russia’s oil-refining capacity has been put out of service, some of it for a long time. Fuel depots have also been destroyed. As a result, there are now fuel shortages in more than a dozen regions across the country, even in Moscow (normally shielded from such inconveniences), where bad-tempered drivers are queuing ever longer for fuel.

There are now plans to import gasoline, quite an embarrassment for a country which pumps out 9 million barrels of crude oil a day.

It’s even worse in Crimea, which Putin annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The peninsula is home to a massive Russian military presence, a vital bridgehead supplying Russian forces on the frontline.

But a relentless series of Ukrainian strikes using new, more powerful, semi-autonomous drones on roads, bridges, railways and ferries has effectively isolated Crimea from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

The drones stalk petrol tankers and military vehicles travelling on the main highways in and out of Crimea. Unsurprisingly, freight traffic has collapsed. The ferries have stopped. Fuel is scarce. And blackouts are common. Russia has even had to remove its powerful Black Sea fleet from Crimea to put it out of harm’s way. Quite the humiliation, since Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy.

It’s not clear how much Putin knows about any of this. The paranoid dictator has built an impenetrable echo chamber around himself, within which he is told only what he wants to hear.

It is populated by a mixture of senior military lackeys and old cronies from his KGB days. Bad news, they have easily worked out, isn’t a career-enhancing move. So they don’t give him any. They even produce a specially sanitised, bespoke version of the news for his delectation.

Stuck in this vortex of disinformation and downright lies, Putin often doesn’t have a clue what’s actually going on.

But even he couldn’t ignore the ominous dark clouds of burning oil over the Moscow sky some days ago, nor the black rain falling across the capital.

Ukrainian drones had struck the city’s main oil refinery again, this time putting it out of action for maybe 18 months and ensuring fuel shortages will remain a daily reality. Another humiliation, given Moscow has some of the best air defences in the world. Putin’s response was to retaliate.

He unleashed more than 70 missiles and almost 500 drones on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing at least 21 and wounding 85 in the capital alone.

The death toll will rise as rescuers rake through the rubble of some 20 residential blocks. It’s a gruesome business, but Putin is in no mood for peace.

His echo chamber is still telling him he can win – and nobody is within his earshot to gainsay or contradict that.

There are still more than 700,000 Russian troops massed in eastern Ukraine, maintaining deadly pressure on Ukraine’s fortress belt in Donbas which, if it were to fall, would put the whole country in peril.

Certainly, Russia has far more shells to fire than Ukraine and can deploy swathes of missiles and hundreds of guided bombs a day on a scale Ukraine cannot come near matching.

And frontline reports from battle-hardened Ukrainian soldiers who are aware of Russia’s suffering and setbacks, are reporting that there is still no sign of its forces collapsing.

Putin is being told all that – and more. But the home front continues to deteriorate. The initial war-driven stimulus is petering out: the economy grew by only one per cent last year, it will be less than that this year.

Unemployment remains very low. But that merely reflects the loss of so many lives on the battlefield and the fact so many other young folk have fled the country to escape military service.

Inflation and interest rates are cripplingly high. The national debt and the annual budget deficit were in fine fettle when the war started. But while the debt is still low, budget deficits are rising fast as defence devours almost 10 per cent of GDP (and half of all state spending). The national wealth fund, which has been pillaged to pay for the war, has run out of liquid assets to finance it.

More than 60 per cent of Russians now think economic conditions are worsening, and 56 per cent believe that the war is hitting their living standards.

Concerns about a deteriorating economy are adding to the growing anti-war mood. Public opinion is clearly souring on Putin’s “special military operation”.

Dictators, of course, don’t have to bother about public opinion – at least not for a while. But there’s always the risk they will do something stupid.  

You might think that a stalemate with no end in sight and an increasingly restless populace would encourage Putin to call for a ceasefire and sue for peace. Donald Trump, after all, has said he can keep all his ill-gotten gains in eastern Ukraine in any peace deal and can look forward to all manner of lucrative Trump-inspired business deals. 

Putin is just as likely, though, to double down and strike elsewhere to deflect attention from Ukraine and rouse Russian patriotism. The Kremlin is already waging extensive cyber and hybrid warfare against the Western democracies, including Britain.

That could be ramped up, creating various crises and confrontations on the way, keeping Ukraine out of the headlines.

More seriously, Putin could threaten Poland or the Baltic states or even Scandinavia, contriving a small-scale incursion to test NATO’s resolve.

The timing would be propitious for him: NATO has never looked more fragile, thanks to Trump’s hostility to the European democracies and his penchant for dictators like Putin.

The Trump administration has already cancelled the deployment of an armoured brigade to Poland and withdrawn an infantry brigade from Romania.

Pete Hegseth, the blowhard US defence secretary whose animosity to Europe knows no bounds, is reviewing what further US troop withdrawals should follow. He wants to move quickly.

Nothing is more likely to embolden Putin to seek a way out of his Ukrainian troubles than a show of weakness on NATO’s flank.

One expert has likened it to “drowning man” syndrome – the desperate measures a struggling swimmer will take to keep afloat, even pushing others under water to stay alive.

Thanks, then, to the resolve and bravery of the Ukrainian people, Putin is that drowning man.

The NATO allies have the resources and determination not to be pushed under by him.

If they stay resolute and united he will eventually sink to the bottom – if only President Trump didn’t keep indicating he’s minded to throw him a lifebelt.

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Artificial Intelligence, Christianity, Religion

Does AI really have the answers to the truth?

OPINION

Intro: ChatGPT may relieve its users of discomfort, but in doing so robs us of contemplation, of the holy ground between question and answer

Any Individual person of faith raised in a religious setting such as the home will have a fairly clear picture of what prayer means. Prayer is the practice by which we draw closer to God, petition for our needs and desires, request guidance, and seek forgiveness.

For many, the deal has always been that in times of trouble we cast our anxieties and questions and emerge with either some answers or some sustaining sense of peace. Take it to the Lord in prayer, the well-known Christian hymn goes.

It may be unclear when a question becomes a prayer, although that may have less to do with the content of the question and more to do with our expectations in asking it.

I would hope that no one has ever thought of ChatGPT as a god – and clearly, some users don’t even think it’s good according to critical reviews – nor would I hope that anyone has ever asked its forgiveness. Nonetheless, in moments of confusion, I would suspect people have called upon its name for answers almost compulsively.

In a typical example, this might have been limited to things like searching for recipes and experimenting with its abilities in areas such as poetry. Then – with playful irony – we might began asking for its read on our relational dynamics, our habits, or even what the future might hold for us.

While we should remain rationally aware of its hallucinations (because that’s what they are in AI parlance) and lack of moral obligation, there is a powerful belief that it will have something real to offer in these moments. Whatever our claim to believe about it, we will no doubt find ourselves soothed by the tidiness of a five-bullet-point plan and the imitation of a reassuring voice. It offers guidance that at least sounds certain, even if this certainty is synthetic.

Why would a Christian – in theory, on speaking terms with God – turn to a robot with her questions? Because at least this god answers, you might think. But saints and mystics would smile at that response.

The Christians of history most celebrated for their wisdom and understanding have often been those most familiar with God’s silence, not His chatter. His silence became another form of communion, His perceived absence another kind of presence.

Simone Weil, a 20th-century mystic and philosopher, famously defined prayer as attention. In a letter to her priest and mentor, included in a collection titled Waiting for God, Weil speaks of prayer as the “orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God”.

Her original French language makes plain a secret. The French word for attention, spelt the same way as the English, is closely linked to the word for waiting, attendre. The collection’s title, Attente de Dieu, or Waiting for God, bears the same secret: decent prayer is mostly just waiting.

No wonder, then, there is a temptation to turn to ChatGPT. The unbearable wait is exactly the burden that its instantaneous answers promise to lift. So anxious have people become of this burden that even a false certainty becomes preferable to the discomfort of not understanding.

Another piece of etymology is illuminating here. The lives of mystics like Weil were marked by a practice of contemplation, as is the prayer life of many Christians.

To contemplate is, of course, not to conclude, but rather to deeply consider, reflect, observe. But at the Latin root of the word “contemplation” is literally the word “temple”. It is as if the gap between our question and its answer is a place made sacred by exactly the unknowing that produces our discomfort.

When ChatGPT unhesitatingly grants answers to questions of faith, this is the space it is invading. Not only does it satisfy us with a false sense of security, but the satisfaction it offers is its own kind of deprivation. The machine relieves us of our discomfort, but in doing so, deprives us of our waiting. Its bullet points assault our silence. It robs us of contemplation, of the holy ground between question and answer.

For the mystic, this space of contemplation had much more to do with seeking than finding. Lingering in this gap yielded its own treasures: a character marked by patience and wisdom; a deeper capacity for compassion; a familiarity with the mysteries that, for all our searching, resist simple answers; a contentment insulated from the storms of circumstance.

Whether or not we call it holy or sacred, the gap between our questions and answers is charged with this potential. To allow – even, to plead with – a bot to hustle us from it prematurely is to forego its treasures.

Coded for certainty rather than mystery, ChatGPT is ill-equipped to aid our search for truth. Perhaps instead we should do as the hymn says, and take it to the Lord in prayer.

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