At an 80th birthday party at the weekend, I met an academic who was evasive about his field. When he finally disclosed \u201ccomputer science\u201d, I asked him why he hadn\u2019t wanted to say, and he replied: \u201cBecause I cannot have one more conversation about AI.\u201d I couldn\u2019t ask him why not, because of stupid manners; that would have been one more conversation about AI. But I don\u2019t want to have another conversation about AI either.<\/p>\n
Nobody\u2019s opinion, whether utopian or dystopian, seems to keep up with the thing itself, so everything has the laggy, outdated feeling of a BBC Radio 4 afternoon play about AI. There was one last week, and I listened to it patchily, thinking: \u201cIf AI had written this, it would have made a more sophisticated evaluation of the threat posed by itself, and been less hammy, unless the instruction had specifically been, \u2018Write some dialogue in the style of a pretend-family on a party political broadcast from the 90s.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
There are cheerleading bystanders, the people who trust that technological advance is generally productive and good. Rather than engage with any of the crunchy reality of this vast terrain, they\u2019ll tell you instead that every discovery in history was scary at first, and yet was a slab on the crooked, miraculous path to enlightenment. Invariably, there\u2019ll be a bit in the middle where I\u2019ve stopped listening and started thinking about space being pointless, then wham, by the end AI will definitely cure cancer. This is often quite plausible, by the way. There\u2019s a resigned dehumanisation, as if discovery were a thing we consumed, as if we could outsource intellectual adventure and merely reap its rewards, putting no dent in our delight or meaning. But then what do I know? I\u2019ve never discovered anything. And you can hardly say to someone whose cancer is uncured: \u201cBut I wanted to have a crack at fixing it myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markThis is what will sink us: our lust for deliberative, easily diverted, often inconclusive yakety-yak<\/p>\n
AI\u2019s detractors cover a huge spectrum. You know who\u2019d be great at summarising them? Gemini \u2013 from the metaphysical (\u201cThis is the end of the human creativity\u201d) to the deeply credible<\/a> (\u201cThis is the end of the service industry\u201d), from the broad and scary (\u201cThis is the end of the entry-level job, and therefore, of the prospects for the next and every subsequent generation\u201d), to the old-fashioned leg-work case (\u201cHere are 17 graduates whose applications have been rejected within two seconds of receipt, because they were evaluated by AI, which has already taken the job of the HR person and has most probably also taken the job they\u2019re applying for\u201d). There\u2019s a question mark over the billionaire overlords and whether or not their interests are pro-social, to which the answer is so self-evidently \u201cno\u201d that it feels lame to mention it, but does it follow that we should stop mentioning it?<\/p>\n There\u2019s a case for the environmental harms of AI <\/a>so glaring that it\u2019s too depressing to look at directly, and there are intersections of military and politically repressive AI potentiality<\/a> that feel like standing on the edge of a completely novel abyss. And all of it urgently needs consideration, but every conversation is stalked by the knowledge that in the time it took you to discuss it, AI has already become better at doing the thing you had haltingly realised it shouldn\u2019t be doing in the first place.<\/p>\n The very act of chitter-chatter feels like surrender. This is what will sink us: our lust for deliberative, easily diverted, often inconclusive yakety-yak, in which there are so many cross-currents. Often we\u2019re not even trying to find an answer \u2013 we\u2019re just enjoying each other\u2019s company. But what are we supposed to do instead? Read more, then chat? Plainly, yes; and yet AI would be faster, being as it can read everything, all at once. That\u2019s why I wouldn\u2019t want to discuss it at a party; as for why Prof Computers wouldn\u2019t \u2013 well, I\u2019d have had to have asked, which would have been yet more (rude) chat.<\/p>\n The sister of the birthday person gave a beautiful speech, in which she quoted what someone had said at their mother\u2019s 80th: \u201cShe walks, she swims, she drives, she lives!\u201d<\/p>\n ChatGPT cannot get better than us at doing those things.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At an 80th birthday party at the weekend, I met an academic who was evasive about his field.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555965,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-555964","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555964\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}