WILL THE LAW CATCH UP?

AI raises policy, legal and ethical concerns that legal systems around the world are only beginning to address

- SHIJU MAZHUVANCHERY

The 2009 Hindi film 3 Idiots is a dark comedy that exposes the rote learning and relentless competition plaguing India's higher education sector.

In one memorable scene, an eager Rancho attends his first engineering lecture and is asked, "What is a machine?" He replies, “A machine is anything that reduces human effort.” The answer fails to impress the professor, yet it raises some questions. Is a machine merely a tool or can it act as an agent? Can it operate independently or only follow instructions? Can it think? Can it feel?

A decade ago, these questions had relatively straightforward answers. Today, however, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have blurred the lines, challenging our very understanding of what a machine can be.

Alan Mathison Turing—one of the most influential figures in computer science, with the prestigious Turing Award named after him—wrote a seminal essay in 1950 that starts with the question: “Can machines think?” One can go further and ask: “Can machines have the urge for ‘self-preservation’, an innate human quality?” Early this year, Anthropic revealed that its AI assistant resorted to blackmailing when an engineer threatened to remove it in an experiment. The machine's reaction was to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal his extramarital affair that it had learnt from accessing his emails. Though this was a controlled experiment, Anthropic reveals that their experiments found that leading AI models exhibited up to 96 per cent blackmail rates when their goals or existence is threatened. The experiment reveals the inherent risks of this technology that is developing in quantum leaps.

Reasons for enthusiasm