Dateline: London, England – THE ISRAEL-HAMAS WAR has been dominating the media here as in much of the rest of the world. And I’m afraid that like many international crises it has lamentably been yet another chance for the British, be they politicians or journalists, to slip again into an old habit.
It’s the seemingly automatic custom of elevating their own country to a global status that is hardly justified by the facts. London’s newspapers and electronic media inevitably foregrounded last week’s visit by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to the conflict area. But the terms in which they cased their accounts rather slavishly followed the PM’s own presentation of his trip, given to the UK Parliament on his return (pictured above left). The key phrase, echoed again and again in the media, that fell from his lips with studied emphasis (perhaps even desperation?) was that “The UK’s voice matters.”
It’s hard not to immediately recall a blunt assessment made back in the 1960s by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He sounded cruel but truthful when he said “Great Britain has lost an Empire but not yet found a role.” It would be hard to find many people, apart from enthusiasts in the British press, claiming that Britain has yet found such a role, even now.
I do, though, want to be fair about Britain’s sense of itself. There is a laudable effort being launched here this week – somewhat removed from the particular conflicts that dominate the news, those of both the Middle East and Ukraine. It’s an event to be to be hosted by the British government and intended to be thoroughly international in its make-up – and tackling vitally important international matters.
It is the world’s first summit on Artificial Intelligence safety. The summit will be held at Bletchley Park, a country venue that was chosen with some appropriateness – indeed it invokes elements of British history that are justifiably seen as positive. You may well recall Bletchley Park as a birthplace of modern computer science … and famously as the intelligence center where Nazi wartime codes were broken, in a major contribution to the Allies winning World War Two.
In preparation for the summit, the leading think-tank, Chatham House here in London, held a meeting-of-minds this week that I was glad to attend. The organization is more formally titled The Royal Institute of International Affairs, but despite that very English, monarchical name, it is genuinely global in its outlook – and it’s far more commonly and familiarly known as just ‘Chatham House,’ the building where its work goes on.
It’s also home to what’s known as the Chatham House Rules – rules that determine how its discussions are reported in the media. They’re are designed to protect participants, who are often high-ranking government members from countries around the world. The rules permit such officials to talk more frankly and openly. Under those rules, the press may report what’s being said in a session, but not by exactly whom it is being said. In my experience it has indeed helped to encourage free-flowing exchanges of often contentious views and positions.
However, for this particular seminar entitled ‘Dealing With The AI Global Risk’ Chatham House rules were lifted. I therefore can cite anyone I like – name, rank and number if need be.
While the session set out to address the dangers and threats posed by AI, it displayed a tendency, common enough among gatherings of computer specialists, to simply take as read the extraordinary creative usefulness that is on offer from the AI phenomenon. When asked for some specifics of the benefits AI is bringing us, one of the panelists, Francine Bennett of the Ada Lovelace Institute (above right) told all of us present that she has heart pacemaker installed, and unsurprisingly she is hugely grateful for the ‘machine learning’ that helped make her instrument as powerful and as subtle in its operation as it evidently is – keeping her alive every day. Her Institute, by the way, may not be widely known among lay audiences. It was named in honor of Ada Lovelace, who was a nineteenth century trailblazer for women in math and science, and also incidentally the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron.
It’s worth recording that the AI-and-its-dangers event was greatly representative of women. Counting the Chairperson, Olivia O’Sullivan (left) from Chatham House itself, the discussion panel comprised six people, five of whom were female. The sole male was Professor Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, and a winner of the Turing Award, the computer world’s equivalent to a Nobel Prize. The overwhelming message of the night, voiced clearly by Jean Innes of the Alan Turing Institute but taken up repeatedly by others … was the sheer urgency of the task to devise internationally accepted modes of regulation to safeguard the public against the worst excesses of the AI’s high-powered generative mechanism.
It’s urgent because of what almost everyone also emphasized — the frantic, until now barely credible pace of advances in the field. Zoe Kleinman, the BBC’s Technological Editor (below right) said pointedly: “What is so striking is the speed of change. And the problem is that no-one in government can keep up with the rapid pace.”
And what kind of government, or any form of governance, could possibly take on the role of regulating the industry’s hectic growth and its conduct? As Katie O’Donovan, Google’s Director of Public Policy pointed out, “AI knows no borders.” Maybe, it was suggested, it could be a job for the UN – rather on analogy with the UN already doing its best to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since 1948. Given how well that set of global rules has been policed over the years, maybe it’s not such a good precedent.
As the AI session came to its close at Chatham House, my dear companion said “The trouble is, the horse is out of the barn – out of the barn and well down the road now.” It’s hard not to think we’re already too late. Let’s hope the international summit as it opens this coming Wednesday will fare better as it brings together interested and powerful parties from around the globe. And that they might conceivably agree on a shared approach.
High-level participants there will be roughly divided into the United Staes as the leading innovator in the field … The European Union as the most eager regulator in the world … and China as a practitioner who plays entirely by its own rules. Let’s wish them all luck in agreeing on something.
