Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee can be a bit of a backwater. Its routine fare is examining if Government policy and legislation to satisfy that it is consistent with our obligations under the European Convention on human Rights (ECHR).
Committees strive to make their reports unanimous on the basis that a consensus will be more persuasive. Unfortunately, as regular readers of this column will have observed, I am not a devotee of the ECHR: The committee’s chairman did ruefully observe that they had never had a report that was not unanimous until I joined it.
Anyway, This week Committee hit the headlines: On Monday, I awoke to the early morning news and the lead item was our report on Artificial Intelligence (AI) which we had been working on for the last few months, and which was one on which we were indeed unanimous.
Our timing was fortunate because publication was preceded by a string of leaders of the industry issuing warnings that we need to slow down development of AI, and that we need international agreement and regulation, otherwise there is a significant danger of the extinction of the mankind within the next decade.
There are huge benefits arising from AI which increase our productivity across industry and in healthcare.
The difficulty is that way that AI systems generate output which is not determined in advance by programming. There is now an unpredictable relationship between input and output. AI can be so mathematically complex that the output, and how it has been arrived at, is opaque, even to the experts. To be blunt, it’s mastery of data, vastly exceeding our own, and its speed of calculation, means that we cannot keep up.
We have never seen technology before with an ability to play a convincing role as a human, even though it has no human component.
AI systems are already displaying disturbing behaviour including sycophantly, deception, scheming, even blackmail.
We are in danger of having created an intelligence greater than our own, which we do not understand and which will not be able to control.
The Committee’s report rings an alarm bell and demands proper legislative and regulatory safeguards.
Two new commentators have also entered the debate this week. First, Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has added his voice to the need for international agreement on regulation and oversight. Gates has, hitherto, been a technology optimist. His report this week demands an inspection regime similar to the that which governs international nuclear facilities.
The other new entrant is President Trump who says the dangers of AI are just another hoax, just like Climate Change, and the threat posed by Putin’s Russia; That the only regulation necessary to oversee AI is the IQ of the President himself; That the US is lucky that he is so smart; The USA is in a AI race with China and that “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS”
JD Vance, Trump’s Vice President, has been musing recently that the Anti-Christ, foretold in the Bible’s book of Revelation, may already be walking amongst us. Perhaps, he might get the President to look in the mirror.
It would be unfair, however, not to observe that there are several other candidates for the role.
Sir Desmond Swayne TD
