Another day, another apocalyptic warning about the likelihood that rampantly uncontrollable artificial intelligence will solve all of our problems, including the problem of being alive. Hot on the heels of disgruntled Anthropic researchers announcing the end of civilisation by 2030, we’ve now had the portentously named Hugging Face incident, as well as the Australian government’s grim discovery of a rogue AI’s attack on its Medicare website. Swarms of experts are now falling over each other to warn us that much, much worse is on the way.
Thank God, then, that PM Uncle Andy has thrust Britain on to the bleeding edge of the fight against the rise of the self-improving machines. Yes, Burnham went to the United Nations and risked enraging the Orange One with talk of Britain’s prospects of leading the drawing-up of international rules for AI. Slightly awkwardly, however, one of Burnham’s first acts after sweeping into office was to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), the very department that had been leading work on AI safety.
It’s a move that the Institute for Government warns will cause “real harm” and which former government AI adviser Matt Clifford has said “wastes time and energy that’s desperately needed for the actual substance”. Isn’t there something gloriously British about all this? Having failed thus far to regulate the technology effectively at home, we are going to world-beatingly coordinate its regulation everywhere else.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t quite feel like the response of a state gripped by existential urgency. But perhaps that is because all of us – government ministers included – have already become desensitised to the risk of AImageddon. You can get used to anything.
Sure, if one industry insider inadvertently leaks the news that scientists building a new technology believe it might kill everyone, a spot of existential panic is to be expected. But if you ram these tidings down our collective throat every couple of weeks, eventually the prospect of mass extinction acquires the urgency of that bowel cancer screening kit you’ve been meaning to send back to the doctor. Civil servants understand this aspect of human nature only too well.
Like the prospect of the galloping climate crisis, we too are simultaneously terrified by AI and utterly bored by it. The extraordinary becomes familiar; the familiar becomes an item on a civil service risk register, after which the real fear is that someone will arrange a Teams call to talk about it. The median age of civil servants, remember, is 43 years, so many have already witnessed enough technological revolutions to choke a chatbot.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
