Tech takeover? How concerned should we really be? Asks JENNIFER SELWAY
AI experts raise concerns about the potential extinction of human life, urging global prioritisation of mitigating AI risks alongside other societal-scale threats.
“How WORRIED should we be?” This question turns up day in day out in current affairs programmes about almost anything – Putin, the dangers of wild swimming, teenage vaping etc. Obviously, the person interviewed is supposed to say “very worried indeed”.
Last week the “godfathers” of Artificial Intelligence pre-empted the question with a joint statement saying AI could lead to the extinction of human life. They concluded: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
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No mention of climate change here but I expect that was merely an oversight. No mention either that...hello!..these doom-mongering scientists were the ones who invented this tech in the first place.
But the real question is not “how worried should we be?” but how exactly will AI do for us all?
It’s all very well having ChatGPT that can do your homework and write a book in ten minutes.
That’s bad and depressing but not quite as bad as human extinction.
The trouble with computer technology is that we didn’t see how it will change our lives – until it did. A few years ago I couldn’t see how computers would change something very basic like shopping.
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Surely we’d all still want to go to the shops?
But it turns out we don’t because we can go online at 2am and buy anything in the world which will be delivered the next day.
Who would have imagined that when Covid struck almost the entire country could sit at home with their laptops doing something that approximated to a full day’s work; that social media would be the horror it has turned out to be; that in less than 30 years your basic mobile phone would become a camera, an encyclopaedia, a satnav, a music centre, a cinema and a library?
We’ve all seen films and TV in which bots get above themselves and go rogue, but it’s still not apparent how they will murder us in our beds.
We do know that unplugging a crazed computer never works in the movies. Somewhere in the iCloud there will be back-up files.
So although we can’t see how it will happen (and we cling to the fiction that a computer is only as clever as the person who programmes it) it’s quite likely that the AI geniuses are right. How worried should we be?
Twiggy, the '60s icon, embraces "Mimi" as her grandmother title
Labelled by the Daily Express as “the face of ’66” Twiggy is now a 73-year-old grandmother. But don’t call her granny or grandma. It’s “Mimi”. She just didn’t fancy being called “grandma”.
I’m with her on this. I have never wanted to be called “grandma” either because you can’t escape the fact that it’s an ageing word.
People have expectations of a “grandma” or (worse still) a “nan” and I don’t want any part of that. Call it vanity if you like because that’s what it is and I don’t care.
You may say I should grow old gracefully…but stuff that.
My grandchildren call me Jen-Jen. I don’t quite know how that came about but everyone seems happy with it, including me. But I did love the name picked by a woman called Mary Smith (mentioned in Georgia Witkin’s book The Modern Grandparent’s Handbook).
Not wanting to be Granny Smith, she settled for the name Apples.
Passport e-gate failures lead to lengthy queues at UK airports
Long queues at Britain’s airports because the passport e-gates are not working.
I always dread the e-gate anyway and would much rather give my passport to a friendly-ish human border official.
Because, whichever way I insert my passport into the reader, I have invariably put it in the wrong way round.
Is it just me?
Chopping down trees to deter outdoor sex
Plymouth Council could really do with some PR guidance. It’s not long since it cut down 110 mature trees
in the city centre attracting widespread condemnation even from those who probably couldn’t identify Plymouth on a map.
Now the council has chopped down some “stunning” palm trees in Plymouth Hoe because it wants to stop people having sex outdoors.
It seems a little extreme. And I wouldn’t have thought palm trees were very sex-friendly in the first place – all those knobbly barks and spiky leaves. But why stop there?
We don’t have much woodland left but a determined nationwide deforestation could – by the end of the summer – make the urgent problem of al fresco sex a thing of the past.
Classic TV satire 'drop the dead donkey' returns
Made in the 1990s for Channel 4, Drop the Dead Donkey was a rather brilliant newsroom satire starring Neil Pearson and Stephen Tompkinson.
Now it’s to become a stage play called Drop the Dead Donkey: The Reawakening! Quite a few of the original cast are reprising their roles for a UK tour early next year.
I had a look at a couple of the original shows on YouTube and it’s hard to imagine many of those brutally funny lines passing muster today.
A joke about a man jumping off a 15-storey building and the hope of the cameraman getting the all-important “entrails-on-the-pavement shot”?
Forget it. Now there would have to be the “viewers may find some scenes upsetting” warning. We’re all so pathetic.
Metropolitan police to refocus resources
Respect to Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley who has said that from September police will no longer respond to 999 calls linked to mental health incidents unless there is an immediate threat to life involved.
It’s a tough call but the police are not health professionals and the public is always demanding they focus on crime and criminals. The Met’s reputation is at a very low point and Sir Mark’s announcement will cause a lot of flak. But he’s spot on.
Unexplained preservation
Sister Wilhelmina Lancaster died in 2019 and for some reason her body has hardly decomposed.
Hundreds of visitors – including families with small children – are flocking to the small town of Gower, Missouri, to touch her corpse and marvel at this miracle.
It wouldn’t be my idea of a fun day out with the kids. But each to their own.
Nostalgic drama
He period details in the BBC’s drama Ten Pound Poms are terrific. Except for one thing. Kate (Michelle Keegan) regularly makes instant calls from Oz
back to Blighty. Impossible. Even by the mid-Sixties making a trunk call was still a thrilling event that required careful planning.
And even when you got through there would be interference and unexpected cut-offs.
