Whether you want to free it or regulate it into submission, one thing is clear: this new technology is moving so fast that we can’t fully grasp it
At an 80th birthday party at the weekend, I met an academic who was evasive about his field. When he finally disclosed “computer science”, I asked him why he hadn’t wanted to say, and he replied: “Because I cannot have one more conversation about AI.” I couldn’t ask him why not, because of stupid manners; that would have been one more conversation about AI. But I don’t want to have another conversation about AI either.
Nobody’s opinion, whether utopian or dystopian, seems to keep up with the thing itself, so everything has the laggy, outdated feeling of a BBC Radio 4 afternoon play about AI. There was one last week, and I listened to it patchily, thinking: “If AI had written this, it would have made a more sophisticated evaluation of the threat posed by itself, and been less hammy, unless the instruction had specifically been, ‘Write some dialogue in the style of a pretend-family on a party political broadcast from the 90s.’”
