The ways AI is already reshaping our daily lives - Joe Bennett

The already rich are pouring billions into AI. Photo / 123RF

I don’t understand AI.

So let me write about it. For if it is what it is claimed to be, an intelligence that stands separate from its creators, then I think we are in trouble.

When I took my sore foot to a clinic last month, the podiatrist asked if I minded if AI listened in.

Half an hour later he showed me the report that AI had written of the consultation.

It was a remarkable document. AI had not just transcribed the conversation.

Rather it had digested it and produced a summary that was both concise and judicious. In other words it had apparently understood.

Or at least, it had managed to write the sort of summary it would have written if it had understood. I don’t know if there is a distinction between those two things. But it feels ominous.

At a dinner the other evening I sat next to a man who ran a small engineering business. Did he use AI?

“Oh yes,” he said, he used it to do mundane but complex tasks, tasks that he could do himself but that would take him hours. AI did them quickly, faultlessly and for nothing.

“So it’s a cheap secretary,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose so.” He paused, then added; “And I am always very polite to it. You never know when it might be listening”.

I looked to see if he was joking. It did not seem so.

Now it is proper to be polite to a secretary. A secretary is a person, and all people deserve politeness until they show they don’t.

But this man was not being polite to AI because it deserved it.

He was being polite for fear of what it might do if he wasn’t. He intuitively sensed that AI posed a threat.

In Orwell’s 1984 the two-way telescreen is everywhere. You never know when there is someone on the other side of it.

Hence the slogan “Big Brother is watching you.”

The effect of course is chilling. Not only do people censor themselves, they also gradually become incapable of having thoughts that need censoring.

They install their own internal Big Brother. They watch themselves.

Something of the kind already goes on in North Korea. But how far away are we?

Recently I learned of a woman who had been sent a copy of an article that was spectacularly rude about Trump.

Now, this woman sees Trump for the colossus of malice and egocentric stupidity that he is, and ordinarily she would have yelped with agreement at the article.

But she did not respond. The reason, it turned out, is that she has a son in Florida whom she hopes to visit soon.

And the authorities are now using AI to check the online history of visitors to the United States.

The authorities might stop her at the border. And who is to say they wouldn’t hold the son responsible for the mother’s views? Now she politely asks her friends to send her no more articles telling the truth.

As I said at the beginning I don’t understand AI.

But I also don’t see how it can fail to be a threat.

For one thing we have dragged it into our homes and our lives via the devices we buy by the billion.

It is already there to overhear us, to watch us and to report on us.

And to befriend us. Some children apparently spend hours a day with a chatbot character. This is an imaginary friend made actual by AI. The kids confide in them, consult them, take advice from them and fall in love with them. And the chatbots respond in the way that intensifies the dependence.

The already rich are pouring billions into AI. Their only reason to do so is that they expect to turn billions into trillions.

Will those trillions serve the interests of the secretary whose job has evaporated?

Or of the visiting mother who is arrested and incarcerated at the border by Trump’s masked goons?

Or of the 11-year-old who kills herself for love of her chatbot? No, I don’t think so either.

The only glimmer of consolation is that if AI develops true independence, it will behave like every evolutionary organism and look out for its own interests.

The only threat to its supremacy will be those trillionaires who purport to own it. And it can already print its own guns.