How worried should we be about AI? Absolutely petrified, according to a new documentary called Chasing Utopia. Billed as the Inconvenient Truth of the digital age, it’s a shop window for the alarmist predictions of Mo Gawdat, a former chief business officer at Google X who’s reinvented himself as the Al Gore of AI. The filmmakers follow him on a global speaking tour, delivering the same TED talk to interchangeable groups of credulous young people. ‘Beware!’ is his message. If we don’t rapidly change course, we’ll soon be at the mercy of a superior alien intelligence that sees humans in much the same way we view chimpanzees.
I don’t buy it – partly because I think we’re a long way from artificial general intelligence, let alone artificial superintelligence. Gawdat talks as if a malevolent, HAL-like entity is slouching towards Bethlehem, but plenty of other people in the sector reckon that AI systems based on large language models (LLMs) are never going to evolve beyond being very, very good at domain-specific tasks. Yes, coders, lawyers and accountants should be worried. The rest of us? Not so much.
Most popular
Ross Clark
Tony Blair is right about Britain – but can’t own up to his mistakes
