Earlier last week, just around the time when the driver of Rishi Sunak’s armoured Jaguar might have been thinking about typing “Bletchley Park” into the limousine’s satnav, Joe Biden was in the White House putting his signature on a new executive order “on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence”. In a mere 20,000 words, or thereabouts, the order directs an innumerable number of federal agencies and government departments that oversee “everything from housing to health to national security to create standards and regulations for the use or oversight of AI”. These bodies are required to develop guidance on the responsible use of AI in areas such as criminal justice, education, healthcare, housing and labour, “with a focus on protecting Americans’ civil rights and liberties”.
Stirring stuff, eh? Within No 10, though, there might have been some infuriated spin doctors. After all, the main purpose of the Bletchley Park AI safety summit was to hype the prime minister’s claim to “global leadership” in this matter, and here was bloody Biden announcing tangible plans actually to do something about the technology rather than just fostering lofty “declarations”. Talk about shooting the PM’s fox before he had even mounted his horse!
One thing is becoming clear, though: the Biden order and the Bletchley Park summit exude a whiff of moral panic about this AI stuff. Everywhere, there’s suddenly an apparently widespread need for something to be done. The twin subliminal convictions are that the technology is advancing at an unprecedented speed and that it’s out of control.
As it happens, neither proposition holds much water. As the former Microsoft guru Steven Sinofsky points out in a searing critique of the Biden order: “No matter how fast you believe AI is advancing, it is not advancing at the exponential rates we saw in microprocessors as we all know today as Moore’s law or the growth of data storage that made database technology possible, or the number of connected nodes on the internet starting in 1994 due to the WWW [world wide web] and browser.” Besides, he adds: “I do not believe we do not even have a reliable measure of AI capabilities let alone the velocity, direction, or acceleration of those capabilities.”
And as far as control is concerned, it’s not the technology that is running wild so much as the few giant tech corporations that are its unchallenged masters – and that democracies have, to date, been largely unable to control.
If, as I suspect, we’ve been stampeded into a moral panic, the obvious question is: whose interests are being served by it? Three culprits immediately come to mind. The first is mainstream media, which thrive on fomenting alarm. The second consists of the tech industry’s incumbents – the global corporations that continue to build this supposedly dangerous technology while at the same time pleading with legislators to regulate it. The motivation behind this apparent dissonance is laughably simple: a need to buttress their dominance and make it difficult for creative upstarts to break into the AI market; a desire to position themselves to influence whatever regulatory rules democracies eventually come up with; and to make sure that they retain the lion’s share of the increased wealth that the deployment of AI will bring.
And governments? Well, they feel the heat of their electorates’ moral panic and need to be seen to be doing something – anything – about it. Sponsoring a “summit” on the historic site of one of Britain’s great wartime achievements, for example, with all the PR credits that will supposedly flow from it. Or signing an executive order that signifies concern and bypasses the democratic paralysis that grips the most powerful nation on Earth.
In the end, democracies will need to come to grips with three basic truths about AI. The first is that the technology is indeed fascinating, powerful and useful for human flourishing. The second is that – like all technology – it has potential for benefit and harm. It will also have longer-term implications that we cannot at the moment foresee because we don’t have enough practical experience of using it in real-world applications. So we’ll have to learn as we go. And finally – and most importantly – it’s not the technology per se that’s the critical thing, but the corporations that own and control it. Whether AI turns out in the end to be good or bad for humanity will largely depend on if we succeed in reining them in.
If Sunak needs a takeaway from his two days in Bletchley Park, then this would have been a better place to start than pandering to the vanity of tech overlords.
What I’ve been reading
Own ghoul
Boogeyman Diplomacy is a lovely piece about deteriorating US-Chinese relationships by AI expert Neil Lawrence on his Inverse Probability website.
American pastoral
A fascinating New Yorker essay is Beyond the Myth of Rural America by Daniel Immerwahr on state power and capitalism outside US urban centres.
Classified information
Alexandra Tremayne-Pengelly on the US media website Observer.com (no relation) has written a nice profile of one of the great figures of the early internet, Craig Newmark of Craigslist Has a New Mission: Saving Democracy.
