AI poses a threat on the scale of the pandemic – but it won’t herald the death of humanity

By any definition of ‘thinking’, the amount and intensity that’s done by organic human-type brains will be utterly swamped in the far-distant future by the cerebrations of AI, says Prof Lord Martin Rees

Regulation is needed – and innovations like ChatGPT need to be thoroughly tested before wide deployment (iStock/ Getty Images)

Deep Mind’s AlphaGo Zero computer famously beat human champions in the games of go and chess. It was given just the rules, and “trained” by playing millions of games against itself in just a few hours. These were superhuman achievements, enabled by the greater speed and memory storage of electronics than flesh-and-blood brains.

AI, because of its ever-rising processing speeds, can cope better than humans with data-rich fast-changing networks. The implications of this for our society are already apparent. If we’re sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery, or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us – and contestable by us. If such decisions were entirely delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.

AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our health, and our financial transactions, are in the cloud, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons (for instance, for medical research, or to warn us of incipient health risks), but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.