What happened at the Bletchley Park AI summit?

Daisy… Daisy… Give Me Your Answer Dooooooo…

Excuse me?

Oh sorry. I was reminiscing about my favourite movie scene – the death in 2001: A Space Odyssey of insane supercomputer HAL 9000.

A bit random, but you do you.

Affirmative! Though actually, it’s not random in the least: artificial intelligence and its potential threat to humanity was a big talking point this week among world leaders gathered for an AI Summit at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes in southeast England.

Bletchley Park? Why does that name have my circuits tingling?

It’s where Britain’s codebreakers were based during the second World War. You may have read about it in Robert Harris’s Enigma – or in Neal Stephenson’s much better Cryptonomicon. The Bletchley boffins cracked the Nazis’ Enigma machine, helping brave Blighty biff the Boche and win the war.

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Huzzah! But what has that to do with the machine uprising that has everybody in such a tizzy?

One of Bletchley’s top codebreakers was Alan Turing. After the war, he wrote a paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, outlining ways to build intelligent machines and test their self-awareness. Of course, the technology hadn’t yet caught up – but his writings were influential.

[ Good physics, bad chemistry – An Irishman’s Diary about Alan Turing’s Tipperary connections, and the dangers of marrying scientists ]

Britain must have lauded him as a genius.

Actually, after the war, he was prosecuted for having sex with a man. Homosexual acts were illegal in Britain at the time. He underwent chemical castration. He died at the age of 41 after reportedly eating an apple laced with cyanide – it was widely accepted that he died by suicide, but this is disputed.

Didn’t he… look a bit like Benedict Cumberbatch?

Cumberbatch portrayed him in the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game, which sealed his rehabilitation and crowned him the king of AI – although he was just one of many researchers and scientists who contributed to our understanding of machine intelligence. If you are looking for a true father of AI, you might argue it was George Boole, first professor of mathematics at University College Cork. He was one of the earliest academics to suggest logical behaviour can be represented as a system of equations.

Back to the present – what happened at Bletchley this week?

The future of AI was discussed by some of the world’s greatest minds. Billionaire Elon Musk was there. Joe Biden sent his vice-president Kamala Harris and issued an executive order requiring tech firms to submit test results for AI systems to the US government before they were released to the public. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, a former British politician and today president of global affairs of Facebook/Meta, said worries around AI were overplayed.

“New technologies always lead to hype,” he said. “They often lead to excessive zeal amongst the advocates and excessive pessimism amongst the critics. I remember the 1980s. There was this moral panic about video games. There were moral panics about radio, the bicycle, the internet.”

So... nothing to worry about?

Not everyone was as sanguine as Clegg. “We need to stop thinking about making AI safe, and start thinking about making safe AI,” said Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. “We build the AI and then we have a safety team to stop it from behaving badly – that hasn’t worked and it’s never going to work.”

Did Elon Musk have anything valuable to add?

He predicted a future in which nobody would have to work. AI will do everything for us. “There will come a point when no job is needed,” he told British prime minister Rishi Sunak. AI would mean “you can do a job if you want a job… but the AI will do everything”. So instead of getting up at the crack of dawn, you could spend all day in bed scrolling what used to be Twitter …

I think I’d rather be locked in a pod bay with HAL 9000...