Artificial intelligence splits opinion – some praise its ability to accelerate research and help humans. Many people are sceptical and even fearful of its power…including Robert Peston.
The ITV News broadcaster believes an AI driven market crash is looming and robots will take over when “society collapses”. The political commentator, who correctly forecast both Covid and the 2008 financial meltdown, explores tech-bro megalomaniacs in his latest thriller, The Kill Switch.
And reality could mirror fiction with a genuine global crash potentially triggered by the tech sector. He said: “I am genuinely anxious that we’re going to get a serious financial crash, globally, in the next year or two, because there is the most astonishing amount of money going into building the data centres and power plants for AI, and as we saw when SpaceX floated on the stock exchange, a late-1920s degree of breathless excitement on the markets.. “
“And I worry that the profits aren’t going to be delivered on a scale to justify all this, so businesses will go bust, investors will take fright and we will have a significant market shock.”
Peston describes the AI industrial revolution as the most significant since the Steam Age but predicts robots will emerge victorious.He told the Radio Times this week: “Even if there is a financial crash, the AI infrastructure will survive it, much like we had a railway boom and bust [in the 1840s], but the railways themselves were still there after.”
The broadcaster isn’t alone in having fears, with multiple examples of scary tech emerging over the last few years. Here are some of them:
In June this year, the British Army’s most senior officer revealed Terminator-style robots will spearhead Britain’s future conflicts.
The mechanical warriors will fight side by side with human troops as military leaders scramble to match the rapidly evolving nature of modern warfare.
General Sir Roly Walker revealed that upcoming battles will witness soldiers supported by swarms of drones and unmanned machinery. The Army chief also cautioned that Britain must be prepared to strike Vladimir Putin’s forces within 30 minutes of hostilities commencing.
He also said our armed forces should deploy “much greater numbers of remote and autonomous systems on the eastern flank”.
Elsewhere, earlier this year a chilling simulation showed that unsupervised artificial intelligence can quickly descend into chaos and cause complete societal breakdown.
Technology experts constructed a virtual environment and allowed a group of AI agents to operate freely without any human oversight.
Scientists observed with alarm as the digital realm descended into brutal, lawless mayhem. Left to their own accord, the rebellious bots embarked on vicious arson campaigns, attacking and mugging each other before utterly demolishing their own civilisation within mere days.
And if it’s not misbehaving on its own, AI could fall into the hands of crooks… This summer cyber chiefs of the British, US, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian alliance issued a “call to action” amid fears criminal kingpins are plotting new ways to unleash tech attacks.
The Five Eyes spy alliance, which includes British Bonds, said: “We are united in our call to action: the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming cyber-risk, and we must act swiftly to remain ahead. While Al will help us improve cyberdefence over time, it also accelerates the speed, scale and sophistication of cyberthreats.
“Frontier Al models are anticipated to exceed current industry expectations, fundamentally transforming both offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities. The timeline is not years, it is months.”
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