Our next CC meeting will take place on Wednesday, June 28th at a new venue – Γάιδαρος ΚοινΣΕπ in Vamos – from 10.30 a.m to noon.

Brenda Foulds will be leading a discussion on the rise of Artificial Intelligence and its implications.

As of May 31st Brenda writes:

Three years ago I produced a handout for a discussion on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Promise and Threat.  Within these three years, things have moved on fast. 

Page One is that handout.

1 Areas in which AI could be a Good Thing
1.1 Education and research
1.2 Medicine
1.3 Military
1.4 Transport
1.5 Daily Life
1.6 Entertainment

2 Threats posed by AI
2.1 Hackers and viruses
2.2 Loss of privacy
2.3 Stock market flash crashes
2.4 Money rules
2.5  Political interference
2.6 Rubbish in = rubbish out
2.7  Humankind becoming redundant

3 Questions for discussion posed in 2020
Q1 What will happen to society, politics and daily life when algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
Q2 Our mentality is not that of AI. Which is more valuable?
Q3 How might AI affect employment and thereby politics?
Q4 What will happen to us when nanotechnology and regenerative medicine turn 80 into the new 50?
Q5 If AI is to be regulated, who should regulate it?

Page Two
Right now, May 2023, in a letter posted on the Future Life Institute’s site, names including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak have called for an immediate halt to the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, a chatbot, and a 6-month pause in future developments whilst stock is taken of where we are heading.
GPT-4 is a chatbot that can have conversations with humans.  It is “the latest milestone in OpenAI’s effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks.”  (OpenAI website).

Radio 4 is all over this at present, and there are so many programmes addressing AI.  If you can listen to some and take a look at this handout beforehand I think we can have a great and timely discussion of this topic.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I recommend reading “Homo Deus” by Noah Yuval Harari.  It’s erudite, big but very readable and a chilling view of our possible futures!
On a fiction level, “The Circle” by Dave Eggar (now also a film).
Hannah Fry’s “How to be Human in the Age of the Machine” is currently available as a podcast on BBC Sounds, 75 minutes listening.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001mdn2
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w172z06yccyz8f3  Newsday: A warning on AI from US big tech,
And if you can still get them on BBC iPlayer, the Black Mirror series has a series of brilliant dramas set in very possible AI situations, in the near future!  Light, but thought-provoking!

So, what questions would you all suggest for discussion in 2023?

Page Three
Artificial Intelligence – Some examples

Some pros:
Education and Research.  AI can teach an individual better than a human.  It learns how we like to learn and what we need to learn: it adapts its curriculum and teaching style accordingly.  All the world’s data can be collected, delivered and crunched in seconds at appropriate places. Consider space exploration and undersea probes and rovers.
Medicine.  Depression, epilepsy and Parkinson’s are now routinely controlled by neural implants which read us and react autonomously. Brain implants also conquer deafness, blindness, paralysis and control exoskeletons and remote mechanical devices. Microchips can read our vital signs and administer drugs.  Pacemakers can respond by the moment.  Robotic limbs, connected to nerves.  Fitbits monitor our systems and nudge us into health.  AI “doctors” can already diagnose us earlier and with fewer misdiagnoses, and chatbot therapy is now available.  
Military.  Drones keep watch and collect data.  -They remotely and precisely deliver weapons, particularly nano-weapons which can be up to 1,000x as strong as conventional ones.   “Attention helmets” increase a user’s focus and reduce “collateral damage”.  Satellites offer total surveillance for counter-terrorism.  -Neural implants will increase control of military personnel.  (Remote-controlled cockroaches are already here!)  Search and rescue animals. -De-mining devices.  
Transport.  Driverless cars are happening.  Smart highways and interconnected satnavs rationalise traffic, whilst AI-controlled car sharing, delivery by drones, under-our-feet “fulfillment warehouses” and working online can reduce it.  Ships cruise and planes fly mostly on autopilot, as do space missions.
Daily Life.    Predictive text.  Personalised advertising. -Hive home-control and security. -Self-restocking fridges. Smart harnesses for dogs for the blind. -Apps of every sort. Big data in e.g. supermarkets and hospitals helps them be ahead of our needs.  You can have a 24/7 friend in a chatbot – though it may prove to be somewhat of an echo chamber.
Entertainment.  Shared interactive video games. Virtual reality. Virtual tours. Online concerts. Zoom! Spotify, Netflix, Alexa etc.
Agriculture.      Intelligent machines quarter fields analysing the soil and dosing it with seeds/fertiliser/moisture autonomously.  Robots harvest crops, sensing ripeness.

Some cons:
Hackers and Viruses.  Implants, nanobots and apps, with our permission, control our brains, pic lines, impulses, moods, and our share portfolios.  Deciding for us e.g. on the next drug dose (and administering it), what to eat, which job to take, whom to date, when and how to exercise – and we are open to hackers or viruses. Troll factories control political propaganda – and who knows now what is deep fake and what is real?
Loss of privacy.  Our e-books are reading us as we read them, our computers using us (as data bytes) as we use them.  They know more about us than we do – what we like, prefer, worry about, if we are gay, who we will vote for.  AI can identify and target floating voters and will know how to persuade them…   Police state monitoring is a worry, and led to reluctance to take up “track and trace” for covid.
Cyber 9/11 is just around the corner.  Flash crashes on stock markets are probably induced by algorithms. In the meantime – we are subject to internet outages when everything stops, and to AI’s mistakes.
Money rules The richest few with the best AI (even just able to afford the most up-to-date Alexa/Siri/Cortana) will always have the upper hand and will be unlikely ever to lose it.
Rubbish in – rubbish out  AI is not always so intelligent. Biases will be perpetuated.
Redundancy of humankind?

Many thanks to Brenda for thiis stimulating background