At the end of Rishi Sunak’s artificial intelligence summit on Thursday, he interviewed the Tesla to Twitter (now X) billionaire Elon Musk, one of his Bletchley Park guests, about what an AI future really holds.
Musk has long warned that AI will prove “the most disruptive force in human history”. He told Sunak and his tech audience it could turn out to be the end of work as we’ve known it, as AI-driven robots take over more and more areas of employment.
As I read the headlines, my thoughts went back to how legislators across these islands have responded so far to the consequences of an AI revolution. Back in the spring of 2018 a House of Lords select committee — asked the previous June “to consider the economic, ethical and social implications of advances in artificial intelligence” — produced its report.
The committee had considered the kind of workless world Musk is postulating. But their lordships concluded: “While we have discussed the possibilities of a world without work, and the prospects of super intelligent machines which far surpass our own cognitive abilities, we believe the real opportunities and risks of AI are of a far more mundane, yet still pressing, nature’.
In March 2021 our devolved Scottish government produced its own AI strategy. The chairwoman of its steering group was the then finance secretary Kate Forbes. Her group was determined that “Scotland will become a leader in the development and use of trustworthy, ethical and inclusive AI”.
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Quite how that strategy, drawn up in an alliance with an Edinburgh-based venture called Data Lab, demonstrates its trustworthiness or its ethics was not spelt out.
When it comes to inclusiveness, public participation in shaping Holyrood’s AI strategy was conducted by a Brussels-based network called Democratic Society. It canvassed public opinion on AI. Having read its own account of how it did that, I am not convinced by the results. It held three workshops, one in Edinburgh, one online and one in Inverness, between November 2022 and January 2023.
Edinburgh produced just 12 participants, The online session 15. And Inverness just 8. Democratic Society admits “difficulty engaging with members of the public who did not, in general, think positively of AI”. But any pollster who could only find 35 individuals to express their views on AI would surely not be in business for very long.
The political impetus behind a distinctively Scottish approach to the rise of artificial intelligence has also waned. Forbes, having narrowly lost out in the race to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as first minister, has returned to the back benches. The AI Alliance with Data Lab is now chaired by Catriona Campbell, EY UK&I’s client technology and innovation officer.
One of the leading voices is civil servant Tom Wilkinson, who early this year became the Scottish government’s chief data officer (CDO). As Wilkinson told Government Transformation Magazine in March: “I’m wary of five-year strategies in the digital and data space where what’s possible and what people want can change quickly. It’s good to be agile and dynamic about what we’re doing.”
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Does CDO Wilkinson’s stated wariness mean that the promise she made on page 36 of that strategy that “Scotland will become an acknowledged AI powerhouse, a country that sets standards in collaboration and innovation, one that leads the way in adopting AI technologies” is destined to become just another SNP pledge reduced to smithereens?
Scottish ministers and former ministers and their advisers are already embroiled in a row over who deleted what WhatsApp messages, emails or even written records during the Covid pandemic.
The ongoing inquiries into the outbreaks are already warning of the legal consequences of failing to deliver relevant exchanges when requested. And where exchanges have already been been revealed in the ongoing Covid inquiry in London, the sheer coarseness of the language deployed by leading politicians and some of their senior advisers has cast how power is exercise in a shameful new light.
If some of the politicians who have sought the power to lead us and the apparatchiks with which they have surrounded themselves are so fond of the gutter, what change is there that we can learn to live with what that lords AI inquiry called super intelligent machines?
