Bletchley Park

• The World Economic Forum 2024, held in Davos, Switzerland will be addressing the challenges that technology poses for global business in this digital epoch.
• Acumen will be interviewing attending companies and uncovering the visions of global business leaders across a range of industries.
• In these one-to-one interviews, Acumen will understand how businesses are adapting their goals in alignment with ever-changing technological advancements.
• Acumen will be documenting how business leaders confront the challenges posed by the digital revolution and today's market.

• But whether that future will prove utopian, apocalyptic or somewhere in between is anyone’s guess.
• In February, ChatGPT set the record as the fastest app to reach 100 million users.
• Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

AI’s black box problem

• The black box metaphor explains why people’s beliefs about AI are all over the map.
• Predictions range from utopia to extinction, and many even believe an artificial general intelligence (AGI) will soon achieve sentience.
• Read more:
  A year of ChatGPT: 5 ways the AI marvel has changed the world

  But this uncertainty compounds the problem.

AI, computation, logic and arithmetic

• It runs on computers, and so is automated computation.
• In the late 19th century, mathematicians Richard Dedekind and Giuseppe Peano proposed a set of axioms which defined arithmetic in terms of logic, and inspired attempts to ground all mathematics on a secure formal basis.
• Read more:
  Forget dystopian scenarios – AI is pervasive today, and the risks are often hidden

Deep structure of perception

• This structure is like coloured glasses that shape our perception in particular ways, so that our experience of the world is ordered and manageable.
• Read more:
  Arithmetic has a biological origin – it's an expression in symbols of the 'deep structure' of our perception

  We showed by mathematical proof that when the deep structure of perception was assumed to limit the possibilities, arithmetic was the result.

• Although the deep structure of perception is shared with other animals and so a product of evolution, only humans have invented mathematics.

A Copernican revolution of the mind

• Kant claimed his philosophy was a “Copernican revolution of the mind”.
• The mind is more than computation; the brain is not a computer.
• Rather, computation – the basis for AI – is, like mathematics, a symbolic expression of the mind’s nature and creativity.

Promethean fire

• The idea we can transcend our biological nature and achieve immortality by uploading our minds to the cloud is only fantasy.
• In this way, AI is truly our Promethean fire, a gift to humanity stolen from the gods as in Greek mythology.
• Like Alice, we need to wake up from the dream and recognise the reality and power of our minds.

Randolph Grace receives funding from the Royal Society Te Apārangi, Marsden Fund

• Delegates from 27 governments, heads of the leading AI companies and other interested parties attended the meeting.
• It was convened to address the challenges and opportunities of this transformative and fast-evolving technology.
• This technology has great potential to enhance areas such as education, health care, access to justice, scientific discovery and environmental protection.

Salient risks

• They have put the “existential risk” posed by these technologies at the heart of discussion about AI regulation (setting rules).
• The existential risk they are referring to is an idea that sophsticated AI could cause the extinction of humanity.
• First, the existential threat from AI is given exaggerated significance relative to other existential risks, such as climate change or nuclear war.

Suitable framing

• In other words, a summit on “safety” ended up invoking pretty much all the issues upon which AI might have an effect.
• Hopefully, this amounts to de facto recognition that the “existential risk” framing was unduly restrictive.
• Human oversight might best be described as a process, rather than a value, unlike other items on the list.

Symbolic value?

• As such, the value of the declaration may be largely symbolic of political leaders’ awareness that AI poses serious challenges and opportunities and their preparedness to cooperate on appropriate action.
• But heavy lifting still needs to be done to translate the declaration’s values into effective regulation.
• The summit highlighted two fundamental questions, the answers to which will be decisive in shaping the future of AI.
• The second is, how will genuine deliberation by the public and accountability be brought into this process?

• John Tasioulas receives funding from Schmidt Futures AI2050 Program; and in the past from the AHRC, British Academy, Future of Life Institute; Wellcome Foundation.
• Sir Nigel Shadbolt receives funding from funding from the Alan Turing Institute and the Oxford Martin School project on Ethical Web and Data Architectures.

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will build and deliver the new system with the next generation HPE Cray EX supercomputers and over 5,000 state-of-the-art NVIDIA GH200 superchips.
• Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, Director of the Isambard National Research Facility at the University of Bristol, said: “Isambard-AI represents a huge leap forward for AI computational power in the UK.
• We are proud to partner with the UK Government and the University of Bristol to give UK researchers and industry access to Europe's largest AI system for open science."
• Bristol is one of the top UK universities for AI research and scientific computing.