HRH The Prince of Wales has taken another bold step into controversy, but it is something that affects us all – even more than his views on architecture and on a par with his concerns for the natural planet.
This week he turned his attention to robotics and the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, or AI as it is commonly known.
He told GQ Magazine report that he was horrified at the prospect of the human race becoming “half human, half machine”.
If one can criticise this well-intentioned observation, it would be only to say that machines risk totally cannibalising our functions as humans, and a half-way compromise is not the end game, alas.
Furthermore, there are two ways to counter the threat from AI. More about that later.
That said, there are areas where I believe that AI will seep in, but never totally take over. In journalism, there are some stories that cannot be pieced together simply by stalking Twitter for a quote.
Some of the best stories come from human interaction. They involve picking up the phone, the same way as I was trained to do as a junior reporter in the 1980s, and talking to the primary source. Only that way would you get an exclusive quote and very regularly, advance the story beyond what the source would like you to report courtesy of Twitter spoon-feeding.
But therein lies a lot more treasure. To get the best quotes in journalism requires personal trust. Human-to-human trust. Not a machine phoning you with AI skills and trying to win your trust because you are familiar with its brand, be it a newspaper, online news service or TV or radio service.
That means that, at very least, 10 percent or more of daily editorial content will always need genuine human input. There are things people will say off the record, or in confidence, to a human that they could not bring themselves to trust in a machine.
Just like people have learned that Amazon’s Alexa is a risky enterprise. This “listening post” hears everything you say and is supposed to react in certain situations when the word Alex or Echo are uttered at the front.
We have seen it send confidential emails from people’s accounts to others. It is very embarrassing even if the tech is still young and in need of much refinement.
As for Prince Charles’ comments more widely, we may not be able to halt the pursuit of AI or even do much to regulate or impede it.
Certainly a year ago Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg were locked in debate about how automation was killing jobs and what needed to be done to compensate workers. Musk said he believed that in enrichening himself, a surcharge was then necessary in order to pay people who lost their jobs a financial benefit.
But is that a good thing? It reminds me of zombie-like people in the recent movie Ready Player One who play immersive computer games all day long because they have no other useful pursuit. Not only geeky, but wasteful, sad and lonely.
Surely, Prince Charles is right to dispute what future people will have in a AI world.
But how to deal with it?
Well, there are two ways. The first involves the Musk solution. In effect, introducing AI very quickly so that it boosts enterprise and starts to earn a “Return On Investment”. Then use that money to pay people whose jobs are displaced by the new tech.
The other option, and one I favour, is that we see a much slower adoption of AI and one in which the government’s interfere becomes a bit of a nuisance in the creativity of the AI and its otherwise wild proliferation.
This involves forcing companies which are about to save cash by displacing staff putting in money to retrain their staff, and so prevent staff losing jobs.
It is true we must not defend pointless dead-end jobs, but we must help people to adapt to new jobs and horizons. We can create more wealth not by AI displacing humans, but by building a partnership with humans.
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