Stratford Guild Talk 12 February - REVIEW - Artificial Intelligence: the future is now!
- RW
- Feb 12
- 3 min read
Our speaker John Handby, has spent his whole career in computing and AI occupying a number of very senior executive and advisory posts. He opened his talk with a brief indication of the potential benefits of AI but spent most of his talk opening our eyes to the dangers inherent in the technology.
We started with the good news: AI will revolutionise health care, allow drugs to be designed and manufactured faster, enable early diagnosis of diseases like cancer and heart disease, design and print human cells to repair brain and heart malfunctions and even make replacement organs. Life expectancy will be extended, the elderly will be monitored by devices that check their daily habits and it will even provide companionship for people living alone. The office domain will be replaced with algorithms freeing us from what he called ‘drudge tasks’ that nobody wants to do and it will revolutionise our infrastructure with driverless cars and trucks.
Unfortunately, he believes that the NHS is not up to the task of capitalising on these perceived benefits. But, far more worryingly, he went on to discuss the dangers associated with the technology. Individual privacy has already been lost; there is more data collected now about each of us in 2 hours than was collected in the whole of human history up to the millennium. Google, Amazon and Meta know more about us than we do ourselves. Add to this, the ‘filter bubbles’ created by the social media algorithms, which enhance extreme views and conflict, and we have an increasingly dystopian world.
It is currently believed that, within only three years, AI devices will be more intelligent than humans, by the 2030s they will have super-intelligence and by 2045 they will be able to directly interface with the human brain. And the industry leaders, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos and others, continue to reject regulation and plan even more development. He made the point that, in the past, successful entrepreneurs, either by philanthropy or staff benefits, shared the profits. Today’s more selfish billionaires don’t take the same approach.
Another major social issue will be the massive job losses that will be caused. Some estimates put the figure at 15 million in the UK alone and he doesn’t believe that there will be anything like that number of replacement jobs.
There are also the ‘bad actors’ like China, Russia, N Korea, Iran, who have been using AI to serve hostile objectives for some time. Can we maintain our defences against them?
So, can AI be contained? Was Hollywood prescient, when Hal refused to be shut down in the film “2001: A Space Odyssey”? John was pessimistic about this. He felt that the power of the ‘tech bros’ was greater than that demonstrated by the politicians and those technologists who support them.
He concluded by stating two scenarios: we stand at the gateway of a liberating era, one in which the first person capable of living for 1000 years has already been born, and the other, in which the major companies continue to act irresponsibly and there is a 60% chance of human destruction by AI.
The warm applause was followed by a lively discussion but many members left the meeting feeling concerned.
Our next meeting on Wednesday 11th March, which reverts to the normal time of 19.30, will feature Val Greathead who will tell us about the fun and challenges of designing costumes for films.
David Balston
Membership of the Stratford Guild is £15pa, visitors are welcome £5 per talk which includes tea/coffee & biscuits aferwards. For more details about the Guild see https://www.stratfordsubcastle.org.uk/stratford-guild