Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

I, robot. You, unemployed

The machines are taking over the world and we will be standing idly by

One evening last autumn, four experts in the field of artificial intelligence arrived in Westminster with an urgent message for our government. There’s a robot revolution on the way, they said, and unless we prepare for it we’re in trouble.

The briefing was a quiet affair — I was one of only a few journalists invited, for fear of headlines like ‘The Terminator is coming’. However, by the time the last A.I. expert had said his piece, it was hard to imagine how a hack could over-hype the story. Computers really are set to take over, it turns out. We’re rolling unstoppably towards servitude to machines.

The four experts spoke in turn, each about a different point in the future, like biblical prophets warning of the End Times. The most farseeing prophet was theoretically the most alarming. He talked about ‘the singularity’, the point at which a computer will be capable of recursive self-improvement; of designing and building machines cleverer than itself and far, far cleverer than us. He said this point might be only 45 years away.

How do we ensure these brilliant robots don’t turn against us? How do we program them to respect puny, human life? No one knows, said the prophet. No one’s come up with a way of teaching a computer human values, so should we let A.I. continue with no fail-safe? This is something for you to start considering (here he eyed the Westminster thinkers) right now, before it’s all too late.

I peered about in the hope of catching policy wonks scribbling memos such as: ‘Must action plan to prevent robot world domination.’ Both the wonk to my left and the right were playing on Twitter. It’s a fair bet that, come the robot revolution, our brightest minds will be too busy tweeting to notice.

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