1 June 2023
Keeping Sane
The advance of AI.
By John Watson
Competition leads to extremes and the fiercer the competition the harder it is to restrain the tendency. Take phone hacking as an example. At a time of dwindling newspaper readership, intrusive reporting boosts circulation so, guess what, each round of hacking and spying was more aggressive than the round before. It didn’t need anyone to think that this was a good thing for it to reach the appalling level now being revealed in the courts; indeed everyone involved in newspaper management probably thought it regrettable. Still, for the editor or owner of a scandal sheet the choice was a stark one. Either print the photos obtained by the paparazzi or watch your readership defect to those who will. So what do you do? Give up and close the paper? No, the aim is to take the ship around the rocks rather than driving it onto them. Embrace the devil and set yourself up as a target when retribution ultimately arrives? That isn’t quite the retirement you were looking forward to. Try to fudge things by distancing yourself so that you can claim, and claim truly, not to have known exactly what was going on? That must be an attractive option and I doubt whether many readers can honestly say that they would not be seduced by it. Still, applied across the industry it withdraws the constraints on a rather sordid marketplace, leaving the participants to charge over the cliff together with the mistaken enthusiasm of the Gaderene swine and everyone asking the question “how on earth did it come to this.”
The tendency for competition to lead to extremes is not, of course, confined to newspaper ownership and editing. Indeed, one level down in the same industry you can see similar pressures on the paparazzi themselves. X gets a photograph of a film star in a swimsuit. Y, if, he wishes to hold his position in the industry, will try to get a more revealing one. Creep, creep, creep, along move the frontiers unless there is some active form of control or restraint. Look at the financial sector in 2007 for another example. Everyone knew that the bond packages being offered were unstable and yet the pressure was to persist with them because they made profits in the short term. In the end of course it all came crashing down but until then the financier could only retain a position in the market by continuing to support them. So keep packaging your bonds but ensure that the risk warnings are wide enough to keep you out of trouble when nemesis strikes. And your conscience? Well, if you didn’t do it someone else would. Derail the express and you lose your job. Dammit, everyone else on the market is doing it and you are only pushing the envelope slightly further.
It is because of the tendency of the unregulated market to move towards the extremes that a number of well-meaning protesters in Islington are wasting their time. They are objecting to the advance of artificial intelligence suggesting that projects be paused in order to allow regulators to catch up. Really they could be sitting with Canute giving commands to the waves because the international nature of technical progress means that effective regulation is wholly impractical. Suppose we restricted research in Britain, would it have any effect? No, the research would continue elsewhere and it would affect us just as much as if we had done it ourselves. Suppose the US were to ban such research? Would they be restricting the use of AI at home? Of course not. If there was a technical advance in China and the Far East, how could you prevent it being applied in the US? The fact is that nothing can stop the advance of artificial intelligence and rather than trying to restrict its development we need to focus on channelling its use.
There are many frightening things about advance on this scale but the most worrying question is what we will all do with our time as the chores of running a society are increasingly carried out by machines. There will be less for us to do and, if AI turns out to be as good at medicine as seems likely, longer to do it in. Should we sit on our backsides watching endless reruns of TV soaps and receiving weekly deliveries of food paid for out of the national wage? It is a possible approach but not one likely to satisfy us as human beings. What else is there? To investigate one possibility try ringing a large company or perhaps a government department. It is often some time before you speak to a human being and when you do they are at a call centre somewhere abroad. Put human beings back into the system and you would restore an element of humanity to the experience. Then take a bus. Time was when you could chat to the conductor whose presence also discouraged unruly behaviour. Put conductors back and the service would indeed be improved. What about more nurses in hospital, more teachers in schools, more people involved in the arts, sport and entertainment. The manning levels in most of these areas have been cut back in the years of austerity and that may well have been the right thing to do when money was short and labour was expensive; but faced with large amounts of surplus labour the game will be a different one and one part of our reaction to AI maybe to repopulate services and industry generally, using the opportunity to rebuild better on the back of technological improvement. It would certainly make for a better Britain and, perhaps, the need for labour will help keep us all sane.
tile photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
