To have a sensible debate about artificial intelligence that ensures the needs of society as a whole are just as – and even more – important than those of big tech, Verity Harding admits we may need to solve ‘the Skynet problem “.
Skynet is the fictional AI from “The Terminator” and later films in the franchise that, when it “gains consciousness”, unleashes nuclear attacks on humanity and, consequently (perhaps just as devastatingly), the Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career as a movie star. The idea that “AI is going to kill us all” has no longer just become the preserve of Hollywood and science fiction writers, but has seeped into journalism around the issue.
Harding notes that journalism has come full circle since she entered the world of AI in 2014. She explains: “At the time, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking were saying things about how dangerous AI was and that became history.
But after that time, there were a lot of fantastic news stories that looked at AI more through the lens of public good, trust, and ethics. But what we’ve seen happening over the last 18 months or so is a new push that AI is somehow going to take over the world and kill everyone. To be fair, this view has been held by some tech experts, who are as much to blame as the media, and who have really distorted the debate in an unhelpful way. »
Harding doesn’t shy away from the existential dangers that machine learning could potentially pose in his first book, AI Needs You: How We Can Change AI’s Future and Save Ours– for example, there’s a fascinating if somewhat scary section on how technology can affect weapons, war, and the war on terror – but she thinks that’s a secondary issue. Instead, AI Needs You is a manifesto and call to arms to further engage the public and politicians in what could be the most transformative technology for humans since the splitting of the atom, and perhaps since the exploitation of electricity.
What’s really missing from the current discourse on AI in the tech industry is deep and broad policy analysis, as well as historical context, that could help us understand how we got here and what we could possibly do next.
There are probably few people more qualified to write about how society, governments, and Silicon Valley can come together to discuss the ramifications of AI. Harding’s professional life began in politics as special assistant to Nick Clegg when he was Deputy Prime Minister, after which she worked for Google, first as an advisor on European security issues before becoming a 2016 head of policy at tech giant DeepMind’s AI research arm. She left Google in 2020 to start her own technology consultancy, while becoming director of the AI & Geopolitics project at the University of Cambridge. In September, Time the magazine named her one of the world’s most influential people in the field of AI.
Harding wrote this book in part because “I realize that I’ve had this very privileged career at the center of politics and technology. So I thought I could bring a huge amount of information and context to the present moment. And I wanted to share this with a broader group of people in the hopes that it would get more people involved in the discussion. AI is extremely important and I want a wider range to be involved in the discussion, not less.
Great emphasis on AI needs you presents examples of how transformative technologies have been handled in the past, which could serve as a model for the future of AI. Harding says: “What’s really missing from the current discourse on AI in the tech industry is deep and broad policy analysis, as well as historical context, that could help us understand how we got here there and what we could possibly do next. I studied history in college, so I always look at things through that historical lens.
For example, there is a fascinating chapter focusing on the 1967 United Nations Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, which the United States and the Soviet Union joined despite the Cold War and the race for space. landing on the Moon. Nearly 60 years later, that agreement is still in force and forms the basis of global space law that regulates everything from nations’ use of satellites to missions to Mars.
Harding says: “There is this narrative right now that AI is an arms race that needs to be won. There is some truth to this, and it is a big struggle that can seem scary. But what I was trying to show in this space chapter is that the world was pretty scary back then. The Cold War presented a very real threat of nuclear war, and space travel itself, after all, was a technology based on weapons developed during World War II. And yet, progress has been made: the world has been able to unite for the greater public good.
MPs are more grounded in reality. I know this may seem strange to some people, but politicians meet people from all walks of life all the time. And they have their hands on the levers of power and therefore know what is possible and what is not.
It’s worth noting that while much of the book is aimed at the representative group where governments and big tech meet on AI, the bulk of it is aimed at getting members of the public thinking about ways in which they can get involved to influence the evolution of technology. future. Harding says: “(US Vice President) Kamala Harris recently made a good point: Yes, we can look at the existential risk of AI for all humans in the future, but these are the existential crises in the lives of people today which are just as serious. important: this is an existential crisis for someone who loses their job to AI, or an existential crisis for a woman who has been abused by deepfake revenge porn. The people at the forefront of AI need to have as much voice as those in Silicon Valley.
Harding was born and raised in Bournemouth – “a lovely place to grow up; not very stimulating” – I read modern history at Oxford and then did a fellowship in history and politics at Harvard. She didn’t really aspire to go into politics, but a friend suggested she would be a good fit to intern with an MP, who turned out to be Clegg while he was shadow speaker Liberal Democrats for Home Affairs. She remains close to Clegg who, of course, after politics also moved into technology and is now president of global affairs at Meta (née Facebook).
The difference between Westminster and Silicon Valley, Harding says, is that “MPs are more grounded in reality. I know this may seem strange to some people, but politicians meet people from all walks of life all the time. And they have their hands on the levers of power and therefore know what is possible and what is not. The tech industry has this omnipresent West Coast libertarian and arrogant streak that makes it think it has the ability to do something immediately and change everything.
