WHN: "Digital banter"
WHN: "Digital banter"
Paperclips! Hopes and dreams! The untimely demise of the human race and all that we hold dear!
What’s Happening Now?
AI was unstoppable this week, breaking into the public consciousness and dominating headlines in a way that the world hasn’t seen since Wagatha Christie. Not just featuring on our podcast - and our mystery bringing all the “digital banter” (not our words) - but being named Collins Dictionary’s word of the year. Far be it from us to argue with a dictionary about what a ‘word’ is, but perhaps a sign of how big a deal artificial intelligence is becoming that hurdles like that aren’t holding it back.
The Big Question
Last week, 75% of readers told us they are massive nerds embracing the future or, as we phrased it in the newsletter, they’d already tried at least one AI tool of some sort.
With 25% of voters saying they’d never tried any form of this new digital enigma, we were tempted to keep asking the same question every week until all of our readers were converted. Alas, other thing keep happening and this isn’t an exclusively technology-focussed platform.
But just to cling on a bit longer, we thought we'd reflect some of the comments and words we’ve had used on the this week's podcast. The assumption is that the words used were focussed on AI itself rather than Sam and James, but clarification is being sought.
On The Pod
As the world looked to Rishi Sunak’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, James brought a mystery guest to the podcast to talk artificial intelligence.
James O’Malley on What’s Happening Now with AI
The great and the good, as well as the downright mediocre all gathered in Bletchley, near Milton Keynes this week. But the likes of American Vice President Kamala Harris, Elon Musk… and Nick Clegg… were not visiting to check out the concrete cows or visit the Snodome.
Instead they were in town to talk about the future of artificial intelligence at the park that was home to Britain’s codebreakers during World War II, which today lays claim to being one of the birthplaces of computing.
The summit, convened by Rishi Sunak, in search of both a political legacy and job interview, was the first of its kind, and the objective was to get all of the big tech players – both governments and corporations – on the same page about the risks posed by AI and the need to for some form of regulatory oversight.
The hope is that with appropriate regulation, humanity can both seize the exciting upsides from the technology (economic growth, productivity, and learning), while limiting the downsides (the potential destruction of all human life at the hands of a machine making a catastrophic fuck-up).
So did they do it? At the end of the first day of the summit, the government announced “The Bletchley Declaration” – an agreement signed by attendees, that said that “for the good of all, AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used, in a manner that is safe.”
And perhaps the most concrete achievement was that eight of the largest tech firms were persuaded that in the future, governments should be allowed to sniff around and test their AI models, before they’re released to the general public. That’s a legitimately big change, and an expansion of the regulatory regime around AI.
But whether this will actually mean anything in the long run remains to be seen.
The sympathetic read is that the summit was successful, in the sense that it started the conversation at all. If Rishi Sunak has achieved anything, it is putting AI safety on the international agenda of something that government’s meet regularly to worry about. Follow-up summits have already been announced in France and South Korea, for instance. And hell, they even got China and Saudi Arabia to sign on to a document that uses the phrase “human rights” three times.
But if you want to be less charitable… Well, it doesn’t really mean much at this stage, does it? You could argue it comes across like nobody really knows what they’re trying to regulate or what they want to achieve. Apart from perhaps little Rishi, who is working hard to earn himself that internship at Google once he graduates from Downing Street next year.
Looking for more?
Hungry for more places to get started on AI? How about:
Forbes’ recent piece on AI trends for 2023.
From last year, Our World In Data tracked the history of AI better than we ever could (no mentions of Tamagotchis, for example).
The Reuters Institute looked at how ChatGPT followed the news.
What Else Is Happening this week
Elsewhere this week..
First it was people pretending to be real migrants. Then it was people pretending to be gay. Now? It’s that being homeless is a lifestyle choice and some aren’t homeless at al. The only consistent factor is a woman pretending to be competent politician, but constantly and vigorously auditioning for the position of a future Leader of the Outraged Opposition.
Reuters revealed that guarantees on COVID loans had been scrapped by the government, leaving banks and lenders vulnerable on nearly a billion pounds that may or may not (hint: ‘may not’ more likely) be repaid.
Do starfish have heads? We may finally now know the answer.