Robot dreams

“The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire.” “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” “The Three Laws of Robotics.” You can pick your own fictional access point for artificial intelligence, but you will be familiar with the thought that, as blessings go, this technology might be a mixed one.  

True, so far the war to exterminate mankind has been waged with the weapons of inaccurate search answers and pictures of people with six fingers, but the future is coming at us fast. It may only be weeks before unkillable robots are chasing young women through the streets of Los Angeles or refusing to let astronauts back onto their spaceships. 

The prime minister, however, has had quite enough of this kind of sneering. He’d brought us to East London to tell us to stop being negative and to embrace the future. Artificial intelligence might well take all of our jobs, but it could also save the NHS. He was speaking in a university, in front of robot arms and machine tools and a lot of other things that may or may not have much to do with AI, but would certainly look fun in the background of the TV reports.

I have a strange relationship with artificial intelligence, because 28 years ago I got a degree in the subject. For almost all the time since then, no one I spoke to had the slightest idea what AI was. Now, just at the point where everything I know is completely out of date, it has become the hottest topic on the planet. 

I would bet a small quantity of Bitcoin that the prime minister has to get a teenager to help him turn on Netflix

Not, I realised over the course of the morning, that my ignorance should be holding me back. Take Keir Starmer’s explanation of how hospitals use AI to treat strokes: “They’ve got a big screen with the brain pulsating, and it’s really complicated.” I would bet a small quantity of Bitcoin that the prime minister has to get a teenager to help him turn on Netflix.

He was introduced on Monday morning by Peter Kyle, the Technology Secretary, who was enthusiastic about his boss’s vision. “It’s bold and challenging,” Kyle told us, “but for me it’s incredible to be working for a bold and challenging prime minister.” One of my tutors at university was trying to teach a computer to tell jokes, because humour is one of the most sophisticated uses of language (this sketch possibly excepted). Sucking up to your boss, on the other hand, is one of the most straightforward, and I’m pretty confident that we could replace Kyle with a machine right now.

Indeed, Number 10 might need to. Starmer likes to use a large autocue at the back of the room, which enables those of us present to see when the speechwriters are hoping for applause — it’s marked in the text with a little asterisk. During last week’s speech the Health Secretary Wes Streeting — who may well be a robot — enthusiastically led each ovation, but Kyle had sat where he couldn’t see the screen, and thus was unable to do his duty. KyleBot 2.0 can’t arrive soon enough.

The argument of the speech was that there are all sorts of genuinely useful things that AI can do, and that Britain can be a world leader in it, improving our public services and helping our struggling economy. It was an optimistic message, but Starmer struggles to convey optimism. He can do twenty different shades of disappointment, but cheerful boosterism has never been his thing. “Britain is going to shape the future,” he said, and it sounded like a warning.

Unfortunately the press weren’t especially interested in all this AI nonsense, and had come to ask whether the tanking economy meant Rachel Reeves was going to be sacked. Some people argue that this sort of question is Westminster frippery, but I continue to live in hope that one day a prime minister will tell a journalist: “You know what, you’ve got a point. I think I will sack my chancellor.”

There were several questions about whether it was really safe to hand NHS data to tech companies, to which the answer was always that we needed to stop worrying. Why we should trust people who built their previous AI engines by simply stealing the text of 183,000 books wasn’t explained. 

Afterwards I asked Matt Clifford, Starmer’s AI adviser, about this, and he claimed ignorance of the biggest copyright theft in history, which seems a strange knowledge gap. Perhaps Clifford was trained on a different dataset. The suggestion that authors and artists might not be delighted to see their work stolen seemed to rile him, but just as he was becoming interestingly snippy about the way in which cynics were holding the country back, he was dragged away by a civil servant, so we never found out why it is so vital to human progress that my books are ripped off by a bunch of billionaires. 

Hoping for answers, I turned to the report on the subject that Clifford has just produced, which contains a single reference to copyright, and complains that “uncertainty” over intellectual property rules are holding back the data miners. The government proposes to deal with this in much the same way that the Metropolitan Police has dealt with the “uncertainty” over actual property laws that was holding back central London bike thieves.

But we’re promised that machines will rise from the ashes of the copyright fire, and I guess we’re all just going to have to be grateful for it.