How intelligent are the Artificial Intelligence bosses?
There has been a terrible falling out at OpenAI, the leading company researching Artificial Intelligence.
The Financial Times published a detailed long read on the row this weekend. I’ll try to summarise it in a paragraph or two and then explain why we should be worried about what it means.
Sam Altman, the 38 year-old founder of OpenAI, was fired by the company’s board for failing to alert it to a substantial and potentially dangerous breakthrough in research. This caused a sensation in the tech world. OpenAI staff and major investor Microsoft rebelled and demanded Altman’s reinstatement. Altman was reinstated. The board was fired.
At the heart of the OpenAI fight is a debate about how concerned we should be about the next phase of AI technology.
One optimistic school of thinking fashionable among sun-kissed technologists in California is that creating machines more intelligent than humans is such an exciting and profitable opportunity that concerns about safety, while important, must take second place. Others, so-called long-termers, including philosophers, counter that the potential threat to humanity is so great from machines more powerful than us that we must think about future generations and slow down.
Having just been through a pandemic, in which the response in Britain rested on obsessive scientism fused with chaotic politics, meaning the economy was shut down and millions of poorer children were locked in, many stuck half way up tower blocks or in tough neighbourhoods, and denied education, there should be nervousness about entrusting ever more power to the alchemists of AI who are scientists trying to build a machine that will be cleverer than humans.
One of the fired board member’s lifted the lid on how the AI research process has become something of a scramble. This was in an interview conducted before she was removed for trying and failing to check Altman. Helen Toner said: “This field – artificial intelligence – is really much more like alchemy than like rocket science. You just throw things into the pot and see what happens.”
There are echoes in there of the work in labs, and of troubling “gain of function” research pre-Covid generating new versions of dangerous diseases. Throw things into the pot and see what happens.
We have become so used to thinking of the AI crowd as the brightest of the brightest, because they are clearly highly skilled in their field, credentialed, few in number, and in command of such vast salaries from companies competing to hire them. But sometimes they say something out loud in public, and I wonder. Outside their field, how intelligent are they? Do some of them perhaps lack basic common sense and practical scepticism about human behaviour and what can go wrong?
The FT in its report quoted Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, saying recently it is “preposterous” to believe that AI could ever develop to the point it threatens humanity. He predicted a second Renaissance instead with the machines serving us. That would be nice. And yet…
“There’s no question that we’ll have machines assisting us that are smarter than us,” he said. “And the question is: is that scary or is that exciting? I think it’s exciting because those machines will be doing our bidding. They will be under our control.”
You’ll have spotted the flaw there immediately. He says the machines will be smarter than us but it is okay because they will be under our control.
If they are smarter than us then it’s not going to take them long to figure out how to evade our control and do what they want, or in alliance with our opponents and their machines do what our enemies want.
Machines so smart will not find it difficult to work out our weaknesses and to outwit us using deception.
Deception is a recurring feature of human behaviour and a determining theme in historical development. It’s there time and again. Preceding the 7 October pogrom in Israel a campaign of deception run by the terrorists of Hamas was run with the aim of deceiving Israel’s technologically superior state and the complacent government that oversaw it. Hamas tricked the Israelis into thinking Hamas had given up on all out war. Hamas only wanted economic cooperation, it was claimed. All the while, the terrorist organisation was planning its genocidal assault on Israel.
The AI machines are being trained to read, process and interpret every scrap of news, non-fiction, entertainment, literature, scientific research, and taught to join the dots and answer questions posed by their controllers.
In the next phase, firms such as OpenAI hope to speed up the whole process, to get to an almost magical point when the machines can make giant leaps on their own. They’ll be able to skip many of the steps they have to run through now, where they explore dead ends coming up with wrong answers. Instead they will be able to operate much more intuitively, doing something close to thinking, more in the style of the human brain. If it happens this will be the arrival of what is termed Artificial General Intelligence, the replacement of mere AI with AGI machines that with ever faster computing will be able to outthink their masters.
The suggestion is that the OpenAI board was worried a vital breakthrough on this journey had been discovered by the firm’s researchers. But they, the board, the humans supposed ultimately to be in corporate control, had not been informed about it. Remember what happened when the OpenAI board that was supposed to be in control found out what was going on. It got fired.
No wonder taxes are up
In the Autumn Statement produced by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt there were numerous positive, supply-side, pro-growth measures. It made for quite the contrast with the fiscal chicanery and fantasy of the Liz Truss interregnum little more than a year ago.
After the Autumn Statement there was, inevitably, a discussion about the size of the tax burden. Hunt cut National Insurance from 12% to 10% and CCHQ, Tory headquarters, claimed this as evidence the Tories always cut taxes. As Labour, and others, pointed out. The tax burden is rising and this year’s tax cuts just put a dent in it.
Look, I don’t much like high taxes, I’m for lower taxes and enterprise, but there needs to be a reality-based conversation about why taxes are so high.
The country spent as much as £350bn on Covid. Much of the country was screaming for this spending at the time, and was quite happy to see the economy shut down for a very long time, a time much longer than necessary. Then this was followed up in the energy crisis following the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The government subsidised energy bills on a vast scale. Again, this was extremely popular.
Add to that the insatiable demand for public spending in general. Is there anything, any activity, the majority of the British public doesn’t want the government to do more of or spend more of other people’s money on? Not much.
More politely, Hunt pointed some of this out calmly in various broadcast interviews after the Autumn Statement. The government spent and borrowed a lot of money it hadn’t expected to. Now, here’s the bill.
We discuss some of this in the latest Reaction podcast, on which I’m joined by Tim Montgomerie. We also talk about the rise of Reform, the insurgent party now polling as high at 10% and why this might doom the Conservatives.
Hammer horror
It is going to be a long way to polling day in the UK, whether the general election is on 2 May next year or in the autumn. The two main parties have hyperactive social media teams. They pounce, several times a day, on any alleged mistake or gaffe by the other side to create little videos and social media memes illustrating their point. It is becoming boring already, and there are perhaps eleven more months of it.
There was a particularly egregious example on Friday when Labour spotted footage of the Prime Minister on a visit using a hammer to strike a nail. Sunak is shown in the clip using the side of the hammer, rather than (technical description here) the main bit, head on, the head of the hammer thingy.
Labour said gleefully that the PM is a man who hammers the people yet he cannot use a hammer properly. What a contrast with Sir Keir Starmer, who is the son of a toolmaker, which he mentions often. The Labour attack went viral on social media.
A longer version of the clip then surfaced. The expert lady next to Sunak, on hand to guide him in the wonders of manual labour, is shown telling him to use the side of the hammer. He asks, sideways? Yes, she says. The diligent Sunak complies.
This is standard hammer usage. I knew this because of my Craft and Design O-Grade qualification (grade 2) awarded by the Scottish exam board in 1987.
Don’t ask why I was studying Craft and Design at Castlehead High School, Paisley. There was a timetable clash after the teachers strike in Scotland in the mid-1980s and no way I could combine economics, which I wanted to study, with my other subjects. So, Craft and Design was the only option, I think.
The experience taught me a lot about life, and a little, only very little, about furniture manufacture, advanced metalwork and plastics.
With a tricky nail like that, thin and prone to bending out of shape, it is sometimes better to minimise the risk of striking it wrongly by using the side of a hammer, which is obviously a greater area, and gently tapping it in instead.
Anyway, as I said, it’s a long way until polling day.
What I’m watching
The Train, a Second World War classic released in 1964. Burt Lancaster plays a train driver in the resistance trying to prevent the Nazis carrying off a lot of stolen art masterpieces back to Germany during the retreat from France.
I hadn’t seen it for a few years and what struck me watching it last week is the intensity of the black and white, presumably now digitally restored. The camera lingers on an oily pair of hands attaching explosives to a railway sleeper above flint stones. The close ups of the faces of the protagonists catch every bead of sweat and flare of the nostril. The wheels of the train glisten in motion. The energy of the industrial process is the perfect backdrop to this dark, tense film.
By the early 1960s the best directors and studios had perfected black and white, making the use of the advances made in cameras, lenses and chemicals during the Second World War. That peak is observable in the Beatles classic A Hard Day’s Night, also shot in black and white and released in 1964, the same stellar year as The Train.
Colour was still a work in progress and the outcomes were patchier and less reliable.
When it comes to watching films, a word of praise here for the BBC. Netflix and Amazon Prime have become almost impossible to use. There is too much stuff. The scrolling goes on forever and hardly any of it is interesting.
The Train is on the Beeb’s i-player, where in contrast to the streaming giants the selection of films and documentaries is well-chosen and digestible. Bridesmaids is even on there at the moment, though don’t watch the whole thing if you are of a sensitive disposition. Just fast-forward to the abortive trip to Las Vegas and the intoxication on a plane scene.