Articles

Aristotle for everyone The launch of GPT-4 in March has provoked concerns and searching questions, and nowhere more so than in the education sector. Last month, the share price of US edutech company Chegg halved when its CEO admitted that GPT technology was a threat to its business model. Looking ahead, GPT models seem to put flesh on the bones of the idea that all students could have a personal tutor as effective as Aristotle, who was Alexander the Great’s personal tutor. When that happens, students should leave school and university far, far better educated than we did. Donald Clark...

The EU AI Act The European Commission and Parliament were busily debating the Artificial Intelligence Act when GPT-4 launched on 14 March. The AI Act was proposed in 2021. It does not confer rights on individuals, but instead regulates the providers of artificial intelligence systems. It is a risk-based approach. John Higgins joined the London Futurists Podcast to discuss the AI Act. He is the Chair of Global Digital Foundation, a think tank, and last year he was president of BCS (British Computer Society), the professional body for the UK’s IT industry. He has had a long and distinguished career...

OpenAI launched GPT-4 on 14th March, and its capabilities were shocking to people within the AI community and beyond. A week later, the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published an open letter calling on the world’s leading AI labs to pause the development of even larger GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) models until their safety can be ensured. Geoff Hinton went so far as to resign from Google in order to be free to talk about the risks. Recent episodes of the London Futurists Podcast have presented the arguments for and against this call for a moratorium. Jaan Tallinn, one of...

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...