THE THREE FEARS OF AI

Tim Berners-Lee addresses the concerns of AI in “three pieces”:

1. “Let’s talk about robots replacing jobs. The first take you get on AI: are robots going to take my job or all the jobs of my people? Is an autonomous vehicle going to take my job? Autonomous vehicles are coming. A lot of people, when they arrive somewhere as immigrants, or people between jobs, start out with Uber or a cab company, where driving is one of the things they can do. If that goes away, there is going to be a big shift and we have to be responsible about how we do these things.”

2. The second big category of AI fears lies in its ability to generate fake news. However, Berners-Lee sees AI as the solution rather than the problem: “AI can be a frontline defence against things which can be proven to be false. There’s no way of really objecting to the decisions of AI.”

3. The third and most famous category, he says, is the singularity – when AI surpasses human intelligence.

“Is all this getting out of control? As a kid I read Asimov books, Arthur C Clarke books. Asimov imagined robots would become just as powerful as us and they’d have to be controlled. Ask people who make robots about the problem of robots becoming smarter than you, they say: ‘Do you know how difficult it is to build a robot? You know how long it’s going to take, getting smarter than us?’ Don’t worry about it.”

He mocks the current trend in movies of showing future robots not only as smart, but humanoid. “By the time they are smarter than us, they won’t look like us. A lot of the intelligence already out there is sitting in the cloud, it doesn’t have blue eyes, but it does play a part in our society. The funny thing is, we’re worrying about robots, but we’re not worrying about the companies that program them. People are not good at stopping bad things.”

He says real people, rather than AI, are the bigger threat.