Articles

From Skype to Safe AI In the 1990s and early noughties, Jaan Tallinn led much of the software engineering for the file-sharing application Kazaa and the online communications tool Skype. He was also one of the earliest investors in DeepMind, before they were acquired by Google. Since then, he has been a prominent advocate for study of existential risks, including the risks from artificial superintelligence. He joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss the recent calls for a pause in the development of advanced AI systems. Two Cambridge XRisk organisations In the previous decade, Tallinn co-founded not one but two...

Most media coverage of AI is weak The launch of the large language model known as GPT-4 has re-ignited the debate about where AI is going, and how fast. A paper by some researchers at Microsoft (which is the major investor in OpenAI, the creator of GPT-4) claimed to detect in GPT-4 some sparks of AGI – artificial general intelligence, a system with all the cognitive abilities of an adult human. The Future of Humanity Institute, an organisation based at MIT that studies existential risks, published an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced AI....

Should AI research be paused? Is advanced artificial intelligence reaching the point where it could result in catastrophic damage? Is a slow-down desirable, given that AI can also lead to very positive outcomes, including tools to guard against the worst excesses of other applications of AI? And even if a slow-down is desirable, is it practical? Professor Pedro Domingos of the University of Washington is best known for his book "The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World". It describes five different "tribes" of AI researchers, each with their own paradigms, and it...

GPT-4 has got people interested in the future again We're only a few weeks into 2023, but there has been a sea-change in the thinking of many business people regarding the future. GPT-4 and similar systems look likely to usher in major changes to the way many of us work and play, and they will probably have significant impacts on markets, economies, politics, and international relations. How can businesses become more effective in anticipating and managing these changes in their business landscapes? A new book which addresses this question of managing rapid change is Nikolas Badminton’s "Facing our Futures: How...

Call for a moratorium on advanced AI development On the day that a London Futurists Podcast episode dedicated wholly to OpenAI’s GPT-4 system dropped, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter about the underlying technology. Signed by Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Elon Musk, Jaan Tallinn, and hundreds of other prominent AI researchers and commentators, the letter called for a pause in the development of the large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Google’s Bard. It was surprising to see the name of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, on the list, and indeed it soon disappeared again. At the time...

Never work with children or animals ... or humans During a keynote talk that Ben Goertzel gave recently, the robot that accompanied him on stage went mute. The fault lay not with the robot, but with a human who accidentally kicked a cable out of a socket backstage. Goertzel quips that in the future, the old warning against working with children and animals may be extended to a caution against working with any humans at all. Goertzel is a cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher. He is CEO and founder of SingularityNET, leader of the OpenCog Foundation, and chair of the transhumanist organisation, Humanity+. He is a unique and...

Dystopian fears Polls suggest that most Millennials think the future will be terrible, or at least worse than the past, not least due to climate change and war. Gerd Leonhard fears that such a negative outlook can create a negative future, and he is exploring how to create what he calls The Good Future. By this he does not mean that everyone is rich, but that everyone’s fundamental needs are fulfilled: health, food, shelter, education, a meaningful job, and the basic democratic freedoms. Leonhard is one of the most successful futurists on the international speaker circuit. He estimates that he...

Distant, yet urgent Any organisation which handles sensitive data should start preparing now for the arrival of quantum computing. The technology is unlikely to be ready for widespread use for years – maybe another couple of decades – but it has been known for some time that when it is, it will crack the encryption used by governments and armies, banks and hospitals. Messages sent today will become insecure overnight. A tough subject Quantum computing is a tough subject to explain. As Niels Bohr put it, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it”. Richard Feynman...

The latest generative AI models are sharpening up some long-standing debates about privacy, bias and transparency of AI systems. These issues are often called AI Ethics, or Responsible AI. Francesca Rossi points out that among other things, previous systems were trained on data sets which were more heavily curated, so attempts could at least be made to minimise the amount of bias they displayed. Generative AI systems are hungry beasts, devouring as much as possible of the data available in the world – or at least, on the internet. Rossi studied computer science at the University of Pisa in Italy,...

Some people have biographical summaries which wear you out just by reading them. Lord Clement-Jones is one of those people. He has been a very successful lawyer, holding senior positions at ITV and Kingfisher among others, and later becoming London Managing Partner of law firm DLA Piper. He is better known as a senior politician, becoming a life peer in 1998. He has been the Liberal Democrats’ spokesman on a wide range of issues, and he joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss how policy makers globally should think about AI. ChatGPT and MPs Lord Clement-Jones set up the All-Party...

Advanced AI is currently pretty much a duopoly between the USA and China. The US is the clear leader, thanks largely to its tech giants – Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. China also has a fistful of tech giants – Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are the ones usually listed, but the Chinese government has also taken a strong interest in AI since Deep Mind’s Alpha Go system beat the world’s best Go player in 2016. Are the world’s two AI superpowers doomed to confrontation and conflict? Western misperceptions of China People in the West don’t know enough about China’s...

Crime and science fiction Peter James is one of the world’s most successful crime writers. His Roy Grace series, about a detective in Brighton, England, has produced 19 consecutive Sunday Times Number One bestsellers. His legions of devoted fans await each new release eagerly, but most of them probably don’t know that James is also a transhumanist. James has written 36 novels altogether, in several genres, including science fiction. His novel “Host” is about mind uploading, and appropriately enough, it was the world’s first electronically published novel - a copy of its floppy disc version is on display in London’s...

It is nearly 40 years since Natasha Vita-More wrote the first version of the Transhumanist Manifesto. She was drawn to transhumanist ideas from an early age, but she felt they were too radical to gain widespread acceptance at the time. She was also disinclined to pursue the career in medicine which her family favoured, and went into the arts instead. She spent some time living with a group of Navajo Indians, travelled to the Amazon Jungle, and produced a film about escaping social norms. Since then she has worked as a designer, a philosopher, an educator, a scientist, and a...

The UFOs are back In recent years there has been a surge in reported sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). There are perhaps more now than at any time since the 1950s. But there are also many millions more cameras active on the earth than there were in the 1950s, and the cameras are far better, so why are the UFOs still blurry? One man who has some answers is the scientist and science fiction author David Brin, whose books have won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell, and Nebula Awards. He is a writer of 'hard science fiction', meaning that his...

AI is firmly back in the news OpenAI's ChatGPT and picture generating AI systems like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have got a lot more people interested in advanced AI and talking about it. Which is a good thing. It will not be pretty if the transformative changes that will happen in the next two or three decades take most of us by surprise. One company that has been pioneering advanced AI for longer than most is IBM. One of IBM’s most senior executives, Alessandro Curioni, joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss IBM’s current projects in AI, quantum computing, and...