{"id":749563,"date":"2026-08-25T19:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T19:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/749563\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T19:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T19:52:09","slug":"why-the-threat-from-the-rampaging-ai-machine-went-ignored-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/749563\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the threat from the rampaging AI machine went ignored | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jill Lepore asks why nobody listened to warnings about the threats posed from the AI revolution (Democracy v the machine, 18 August<\/a>). As she is a Harvard professor, her piece is understandably US-centric. But in 1972 there was an international gathering of AI researchers and others in Italy to tackle the ethical and social implications of AI.<\/p>\n

This \u201cSerbelloni group\u201d of global experts (they met at Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como) was led by my father, Donald Michie, the director of the University of Edinburgh\u2019s department of machine intelligence. The group mapped out early concerns regarding potential political tyranny, the erosion of human autonomy and widespread social coercion driven by automation.<\/p>\n

Why did nobody listen? In part because the next year the UK cut research funding for machine learning, robotics and AI, following the Lighthill report, which had been established \u2013 it has since been documented<\/a> \u2013 for this purpose. Researchers had instead to focus on more immediately industrial-relevant work. My father\u2019s attempts to reconvene the Serbelloni group to include experts\u00a0from\u00a0the humanities thus\u00a0proved\u00a0unsuccessful.
Jonathan Michie
Professor of innovation & knowledge exchange, University\u00a0of\u00a0Oxford<\/p>\n

Jill Lepore rightly traces those welcoming the rampaging AI machine in a free market while modern humanists fear the unchecked machine. She mentions the underestimated American intellectual Lewis Mumford, who devoted most of his life to restraining the uninhibited city as a form of machine damaging people by the million. He hooked up with the British humanist Frederic J Osborn in a letter exchange that lasted over three decades, developing a sane town-planning system.<\/p>\n

Mumford was wise enough to see that the automatic machine had the capacity to make man passive and purposeless in the same manner as did living in the city, and humans must resist induced passivity of all kinds. So the myth still prevails. Beware \u2013 AI is really not that smart, and a few well-chosen puzzles for it to solve expose its crippling obsession with data, not with the humans\u2019 forte, knowledge.
Callum Brown
Professor emeritus in history, University of Glasgow<\/p>\n

Have an opinion on anything you\u2019ve read in the Guardian today? Please email<\/a> us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jill Lepore asks why nobody listened to warnings about the threats posed from the AI revolution (Democracy v…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749564,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-749563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749563\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}