WITHIN a week of the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the programme had more than a million users. This has generated both technological exhilaration and deep anxiety.
Since then, President Biden has issued his AI Executive Order from the White House, and our own Prime Minister has convened an AI summit at Bletchley Park.
There has been a Niagara of commentary about the subject, but anyone wanting to know in clear terms what the excitement is about could not do better than read Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
The author was a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, and so speaks with a profound knowledge of the subject, and yet in an accessible and deeply disturbing way.
Suleyman was personally involved in some of the early indications that AI was a truly transformative technology. In March 2016, a tournament was organised in South Korea, which pitted an international champion of Go, an ancient game originating in China, against a deep learning machine, AlphaGo. Go is infinitely more complex than chess and is played on a 19x19 grid with black and white stones. The aim is to surround and remove your opponent’s stones.
In the 2016 tournament, the machine was triumphant, re-writing “Go” strategy in the process. There was huge media excitement, and, a year later in Wuzhen, AlphaGo was matched with the number-one-ranked player in the world. By this time, the implications of the victory of the machine had begun to sink in. It was no longer only a game. AlphaGo won again, but the atmosphere was very tense — and the narrative was strictly controlled by the authorities.
While being very far from technophobic, the book argues the case for containment of the technology, of the kind being attempted in the United States and European Union. Suleyman spells out the possibilities in terms of the potential abolition of privacy and a misinformation apocalypse. AI could also be employed in a new suite of cyberweapons that would eliminate the human element in battlefield decision-making. At the same time, allied developments in biotechnology raise the spectre that we could be confronted by novel pathogens with a global reach.
Suleyman detects a tendency to ignore the threats, as a result of what he calls “pessimism aversion”, and argues for “meaningful control” involving — at the very least — denying this technology to bad actors.
What, above all, is thrown into stark relief is the fact that when we have outsourced our intellectual and manual labour, the great questions for our century will centre on the meaning and value of human life. Human beings do not grow up online, but in communities. There are implications here for the Church — and especially our parish communities.
The Rt Revd Lord Chartres is a former Bishop of London.
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar
Bodley Head £25
(978-1-84792-748-4)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50