Category Archives: Society

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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Artificial Intelligence, Arts, Society, Technology

Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI should be welcomed

MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS

Intro: Magnifica Humanitas is an important warning of the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. Silicon Valley is wrong to dismiss it

When authors and creative writers are asked whether novels of the future will be written by AI, it’s not so much a question as a provocation. Do many worry that a machine can do what they do, only better? As Francine Prose, a prominent American writer and academic says: “No algorithm is going to write Anna Karenina!” which is also not a real answer.

Many will be grateful to Pope Leo XIV, the American pontiff, for his recently issued letter to the world, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It’s a long (more than 40,000 words), intelligent, and thoughtful encyclical in which the pope addresses the uses and misuses of a rapidly developing technology. For anyone seeking an opinion on AI, they might like to be referred to the pope’s letter, or at least chapter three.

The encyclical begins with an appropriately biblical reference to the tragic consequences of a breakdown in human communication. Humanity faces a “pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build a city in which God and humanity dwell together”. What follows is a detailed account of the evolution of the views of Pope Leo’s predecessors, of the Church’s ideas about labour, authority, government, science, power, and our moral obligation to one another. It cites the work that the Church has done in defence of human dignity and freedom.

The third chapter concerns Technology and Dominance. The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI, delivers on the promise of the encyclical’s title. In an eloquent (and most often quoted) passage explaining what AI is not, the pope essentially defines what it means to be human. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.” AI does not have a moral conscience nor does it show any guiding concern for the greater human good.

The letter proceeds to say the most important and necessary things about what is possibly the greatest threat posed by AI: it can be programmed solely to maximise profit, a situation that can only result in the suffering of the many for the benefit of the few. The pope warns against the “manipulation of privacy” and the “misuse of information”, against the uses of an algorithm to manage employment, to control access to public services and credit, and to elevate or damage one’s personal reputation.

Compassion, mercy, and forgiveness – not high on the machine’s list of priorities – will become obsolete. “‘Necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of the supposed optimisation of the species.” If the tools of this new power are placed in the hands of those who already possess wealth and influence, they will be used to elevate the comfort, health, and wellbeing of our wealthiest and most privileged citizens.

As the letter nears its end, the pope calls on us to remain faithful to the truth, to invest in education, to cultivate relationships, to live in justice and peace – to resist the way in which the new technologies can “exploit the most vulnerable, create new forms of slavery and derive profit from conflict”. What becomes clear is that the pope is not condemning AI outright but rather the way it can be used as a tool of political repression and as a guarantee of worsening economic inequality.

In theory, it’s possible to criticise the encyclical for not going far enough, for not using another biblical metaphor – the golden calf – to stigmatise the use of AI because of how it prioritises cost-saving over spiritual, individual, and communal growth. But that ship has already sailed, and there’s not much that Leo XIV – or any religious leader – can do to condemn the new advances as a 21st-century form of idolatry.

Even so, the encyclical’s vision of human nature, of the spirit of justice and empathy that needs to prevail, of the essential importance of the highest moral values – is ultimately so beneficent, so positive, so generous, so inarguably clear about our obligation to protect the weak and the poor, that it’s hard to find reasons to dismiss it.

And yet that’s the scary part. Apparently there’s been a certain amount of blowback from Silicon Valley, where the inventors and masters of the latest technology have suggested that the pope doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Jeremy Nixon, a founder of AGI House, a group dedicated to proving that AI is essentially equal to the human brain, was quoted in the New York Times as saying that the Church hadn’t “thought deeply about . . . AI”, adding: “They couldn’t have a position on it, because they don’t understand it.” And there seems to be a widespread belief that the end product of the current research will be, in effect a new God, or at least a convincing simulacrum. Concerned about the perils of the future, our society is choosing to overlook the evidence that the downsides of AI are already upon us. Many undergraduates in marketing and advertising are acutely aware that by the time they graduate, all the jobs in advertising will have been taken by AI.

If the masters of this new technology fail to agree with what the pope sees as its dangers and drawbacks, we are in very deep trouble indeed. The problem is not that we will have a robot writing Anna Karenina. The problem is that no one will see any possible need for a novel that so exquisitely portrays the sufferings of a woman, a singular human being.

There would be no point in a book like that unless that account of a life-changing mistake could be monetised by a forward-thinking tech bro and used to finance the purchase of a bigger and better yacht, presumably serviced by a permanent underclass, by workers whose dignity – whose formerly valued and valuable jobs – have been pirated by the rapacious manifestations of artificial intelligence.

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Artificial Intelligence, Society, Technology

AI is spiralling out of control: it can be stopped

ARTIFICIAL SUPERINTELLIGENCE

Intro: East and West collaborated to end nuclear proliferation – it is time to do the same for the latest advancing technology. Washington and Beijing must come together to rein in AI’s growing threat

After the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the edge of nuclear war, global powers embarked on a concerted effort to pull it back from the brink. The non-proliferation treaty (NPT) of 1968, which limited the spread of nuclear weapons, has been a resounding success. Only a handful of countries today have access to the 80-year-old technology and those that do have not used it.

In the decades since, no technology has proved as dangerous as nuclear weapons as to require international co-ordination.

Now, however, many believe that the advance of artificial superintelligence requires a similar global effort to prevent an AI-led disaster.

Anthropic, the world’s most valuable AI company, has called for a mechanism to slow down or pause the development of advanced AI. It has warned that the technology could get out of control sooner than many think.

The company believes it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. It says it would “likely be a good thing” if development could be delayed.

Anthropic – recently valued at $965bn (£720bn) – said it had raised the alarm because it believed AI was improving much faster than our ability to understand and control the systems.

Within the company itself, bots are not just writing code; they are also ordering around other bots and even carrying out their own research. Before long, AI could be building itself, a process called recursive self-improvement. This could start a feedback loop in which progress goes parabolic.

Sceptics insist this is just mere marketing. Anthropic has announced that it has filed for an initial public offering and is expecting a value in excess of $1tn. What could be more valuable than a technology so powerful that world leaders need to rein it in? AI that builds itself has been a premise the company has used to raise money for years.

David Sacks, a high-profile critic of Anthropic, and Donald Trump’s former AI tsar, suggested the warning was an attempt to secure a public bailout, implying it was a sign of getting the frontier AI lab nationalised.

Nonetheless, concerns about powerful AI are becoming increasingly prominent. Anthropic has kept its most powerful AI system, Mythos, out of public hands because of its ability to find security flaws in critically important computer systems.

Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, has raised the alarm about AI crashing the financial system and has warned that Mythos meant “things that we thought might happen in the next year, two years, three years or four, have now come right into the foreground”.

AI labs fear that the next generation of models will be good enough to help terrorists develop bioweapons.

If AI were to start building itself without human oversight, it would by definition become much more difficult to control. In the extreme scenarios that safety experts are concerned about, AI’s goals become detached from our own, forcing it to eliminate humanity through evolution so that we do not get in the way.

There are those who dismiss this idea as sci-fi nonsense. But supporters of a pause say even a tiny chance of extinction should be enough to make us consider how to stop it.

Establishing the need for a pause would be the easy part. Making it happen is another matter altogether. If he so wished, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive, could send everyone home today and shut down his company. At best, though, this would delay the rise of powerful AI by a couple of months. Its two major rivals, Google and OpenAI, are not far behind. OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, has said that it too sees “early signs of RSI [recursive self-improvement] in today’s systems”.

It added: “We expect this to increase competitive pressures among developers and nations, and create governance challenges that existing institutions are not equipped to address.”

Even if the US government ordered all three to stop work on AI, this might only cede ground to China, whose companies are typically seen as being just three to six months behind the US.

Earlier this year at the World Economic Forum, Amodei said: “The reason we can’t [slow down] is because we have geopolitical adversaries building the same technology at a similar pace… It’s very hard to have an enforceable agreement where they slow down and we slow down.”

Practically, it would require a government-level agreement and the two nations that matter are the US and China. This sort of agreement would require Trump and Xi Jinping to co-operate on a pause, something that looks far from likely given both have compared AI to a race.

Xi has said that China must “gain a head start and secure a competitive edge” in AI, while a Trump administration action plan states that “America is in a race to achieve global dominance in artificial intelligence”.

It has also emerged that the National Security Agency have been using Mythos to carry out cyber-attacks. This suggests the US government is making enthusiastic use of the latest systems instead of fearing their consequences.

Pessimists often compare the technology and its potential consequences to nuclear weapons, but the two are nothing alike.

The destructive capabilities of atomic warheads are undisputed, whereas AI’s safety risks can appear nebulous. The latter’s upside may also be significant: its supporters believe it can cure disease, lead to interstellar space travel, and make work optional.

What is more, pressing pause on the AI race is not without its own set of risks. Suspending work on AI could cause an economic crash. The chips and data centres that AI relies on have driven a stock market boom that has helped sustain the US economy. Inhibiting demand for them could do the opposite.

There have been signs that China and the US are changing tack. The White House has raised the alarm about Mythos and Trump has just signed an executive order calling for AI models to be reviewed before release.

Beijing has called for a “global AI governance framework” to rein in the technology. This is miles away from the global deal Anthropic has called for, but campaigners have taken it as a positive sign.

The political zeitgeist can move very quickly. The US and its allies have succeeded to a certain extent in deterring nuclear proliferation. To do so similarly with AI is going to be hard, but as we have seen with nuclear weapons, global governance can come together and work for the common good.

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