Timothy Garton Ash is right that serious artificial intelligence risks demand international action, but “AI Hiroshima” may be the wrong picture (Would even an AI disaster on the scale of Hiroshima be enough to make humankind protect itself? Hiroshima was not technology going rogue. Human beings designed the bomb, authorised its use and dropped it.
The technology worked much as intended. AI may one day behave in ways we cannot control, but many of the gravest harms could happen without any dramatic moment when “the AI takes over”. AI might help design a pathogen, find a vulnerability in critical infrastructure or improve a weapons system while people still decide what happens next.
Other harms may build almost invisibly through thousands of ordinary decisions – more autonomy here, one safeguard removed there, another consequential task handed over because the system has worked well so far. By the time the danger is obvious, the important decisions may already have been made. That is also where international agreement could begin.
We do not need countries to agree about superintelligence or the probability of human extinction before agreeing that there are some doors AI should never be allowed to open by itself. Weapons systems, critical infrastructure and biological synthesis are obvious places to start. Governments could agree minimum safeguards, require clear human authority for the most consequential actions, keep records of who authorised what and share serious failures and near-misses internationally.
The greatest AI dangers may not arrive with a mushroom cloud. They may arrive quietly, one apparently reasonable step at a time. If we want effective AI governance, we need to fight the right battle, not the most cinematic one.Dr Simon NiederChesterfield, Derbyshire Prof Jonathan Michie (Letters, 26 August) reminds us that the Serbelloni group, led by the author’s father, Donald Michie (when he was at Edinburgh University), was weighing the social dangers of artificial intelligence as long ago as 1972.
Nor is AI technology itself new, since its roots run back through to Frank Rosenblatt’s perceptron of 1957, to the Dartmouth workshop of 1956, and to Alan Turing before that. What is new is that we now have the hardware and software infrastructures to drive it forward at what can sometimes seem to be a terrifying speed. The Lighthill report of 1973 duly delivered an AI winter in the UK, and the field’s centre of gravity crossed the Atlantic, with the consequences that we all now live with.
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