Chasing the dragon

Harnessing AI for good is already an elusive pursuit of governments and business. But what happens if it evolves beyond our ability to contain it?

- BY DANYL McLAUCHLAN

If you look at what people are using language models for, there are two enormous categories of use. The first is porn.” Christopher Summerfield, professor of cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University, is talking about the predictive “machine learning” algorithms, developed by humans for computers, from which artificial intelligence has sprung. Summerfield, one of three research directors at the UK government's AI Security Institute, holds up his hands, opening each to make his points in our Zoom conversation. “Companion applications. Erotic storytelling and engagement. And the second [use] is coding.”

It seems an odd combination but it’s an indicator of the broad impact machine intelligence will have - already has - on both our private and public lives, offering artificial personal assistants, therapists, teachers, intimate companions, alongside the spectre of economic disruption and mass unemployment as most humans working in the service and knowledge economies are threatened with obsolescence.

Summerfield is the author of These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What it Means, a book that begins with the deep history of AI: from Enlightenment polymath Gottfried Leibniz - who dreamed of a calculus ratiocinator, a device that could solve any question by the use of mechanical logic - and mathematician George Boole, who devised “the laws of thought”, reducing complex reasoning into combinations of the operators “and/or” and “not”, through to Alan Turing with his universal machine and imitation game, testing to see if an automated agent could convince us of its humanity.

It’s a test most modern AI systems effortlessly pass. Summerfield’s history ends with the inventions of the neural net and deep learning paradigms that power the modern AI revolution.

MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN?