AI isn't a threat, says noted science expert Toby Young

Worried about AI taking your job, gaining sentience or possibly even destroying mankind? Don’t worry, it’s all a load of nonsense according to a Spectator article by Toby Young, the rentagob writer not generally known as a science expert.

Young, ludicrously elevated to the Lords by Kemi Badenoch, was commissioned by Spectator editor and fellow Conservative peer Michael Gove to delve into the complicated world of artificial intelligence and self-teaching tech, thus proving his commitment to having had enough of experts.

And, despite most noted scientists, technologists and even many of those within the industry itself harbouring serious misgivings about the destructive potential of a power few would claim to fully comprehend, fortunately Young does – and he says it’s absolutely nothing to worry about, just like climate change!

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Young mocks warnings from Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer for Google X, who has warned that the development of super-intelligent machines cannot be stopped, AI is bound to become smarter than humans at every assigned task and that the programming of AI by humans will cause significant disruptions such as job losses, manipulation and societal instability.

Gawdat is a globally respected software engineer. Young, though, is a former columnist for the Sun on Sunday, and he says it is all fine. “I don’t buy it – partly because I think we’re a long way from artificial general intelligence, let alone artificial superintelligence,” he writes.

“Gawdat talks as if a malevolent, HAL-like entity is slouching towards Bethlehem, but plenty of other people in the sector reckon that AI systems based on large language models are never going to evolve beyond being very, very good at domain-specific tasks. Yes, coders, lawyers and accountants should be worried. The rest of us? Not so much.

“It is surely no coincidence that a new cast of Jeremiahs have emerged – the ApocalyptAI – just as the bottom has fallen out of the market for climate alarmism. Even Greta Thunberg has abandoned green activism for Palestine. Now the climate Cassandras have moved on, men like Gawdat have popped up to fill the gap.

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“And gap there is. Not only does the educated elite have an inexhaustible appetite for secular millenarianism, but they particularly like doom-mongers who identify profit-chasing capitalists as the greatest threat to humanity.”

Presumably the “educated elite” does not include Conservative legislators-for-life in the House of Lords who studied PPE at Oxford despite only getting in after a helpful call to the admissions tutor from his father, also a life peer, after he scraped a B, B and C at A-Level?

“The main reason I’m sceptical, though, is that catastrophising about AI seems like yet another elite boondoggle,” Young goes on. “If you’re a nerdy founder of a tech company, an academic computer scientist or a failed politician, scaremongering about ‘existential risks’ is a surefire way to reinvent yourself as a public intellectual.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps another way might be to be a former judge on little-watched Bravo TV series Top Chef now commissioned by one of your mates to pontificate on things you know nothing about for a once-respected periodical!