Rishi Sunak has laid out some of the potential risks and capabilities of artificial intelligence ahead of the UK’s safety summit on the technology next week.
The Prime Minister has said new opportunities could be plentiful, but warned the advancement of AI will also bring new dangers, as the Government laid out its impressions of the tech in a new discussion paper.
AI could rapidly advance healthcare, science and energy, but we must harness it safely.
Government has released a discussion paper on the risks and capabilities of Frontier AI:https://t.co/YIjyZsgcbe
Read a summary below 👇
(1/4) pic.twitter.com/FJdbKcqk4e— Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (@SciTechgovuk) October 26, 2023
Here is a closer look at what the UK believes could be the biggest risks and opportunities around artificial intelligence.
– Why is the Government talking about AI now?
Next week, the UK is hosting the first AI Safety Summit at Second World War codebreaking hub Bletchley Park, as Rishi Sunak’s Government looks to place itself at the forefront of global discussion about the growing technology.
But AI has had a big year and become a much more mainstream topic too – ever since the public launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last November, which gave many people their first look at the powerful generative AI chatbot, capable of conversing fluently, understanding context and creating human-like content.
Since then, other tech giants have moved into the field and technology has begun to publicly develop incredibly rapidly, leading to louder calls for global discussion on the regulation of AI.
– What has the Government said about the potential risks?
In a range of papers published this week to start a discussion on the issue, the Government has warned that if not correctly monitored, AI could be harnessed to aid in terror and cyber attacks, as well as used to build chemical or biological weapons, or be exploited to spread disinformation, fraud and even child sexual abuse.
It also raised concerns about the possible impact on the labour market and AI’s potential to displace human workers in some areas, although the Government also argued that in many cases AI could be used to free up human staff from repetitive tasks, and new skilled jobs overseeing AI could also be created.
The Government’s summary even says: “Given the significant uncertainty, there is insufficient evidence to rule out that future frontier AI, if misaligned, misused or inadequately controlled, could pose an existential threat.”
It does however add that “many experts see this as unlikely”, and in his speech Mr Sunak said it was “not a risk that people need to be losing sleep over right now”.
– Did the Government highlight any benefits?
Both the Government papers and Mr Sunak in his speech said they believe AI will be transformational, with the Prime Minister saying it will bring “new knowledge, new opportunities for economic growth and new advances in human capability”.
In his speech, Mr Sunak used the example of Moorfields Eye Hospital in London as one sign of the potential of AI, explaining how the hospital is building an AI model capable of predicting a range of health issues, including heart attacks, strokes and even Parkinson’s disease.
In the Government discussion papers, it notes the major advances made in recent years by frontier AI such as generative AI chatbots, and suggests these will continue to advance quickly, becoming increasingly useful as a result.
It suggests that in time they will become increasingly more personal to individual users and better able to help with organisational and other tasks, as well as be able to handle multiple streams of data at once and solve increasingly complex mathematical problems.
In his speech, the Prime Minister highlighted how AI was already being used to help clear paperwork and backlogs in the public sector, and how, in the private sector, AI was being used by legal firms to write contracts in minutes to save time and money.
These improvements, Mr Sunak said, mean AI could become a vital “co-pilot” for many people, including office workers, researchers and scientists, in their day-to-day life in years to come.
– So what is the Government doing about AI now?
As well as hosting the safety summit, the Prime Minister has announced the UK will establish the world’s first AI safety institute, which he said would “examine, evaluate and test new types of AI” to better understand the capabilities and risks of each new model that appears.
He also said the Government was investing £1 billion into a supercomputer that would offer the computing power needed to grow AI models, as well as investing £2.5 billion in quantum computers – another advanced form of computing.
The Prime Minister added that the Government was investing £100 million in research to use AI to help with breakthroughs and treatments for previously incurable diseases.
And at the AI Safety Summit, the Prime Minister said he would push for an international statement about the nature of AI risks, giving the first globally agreed response to the technology.
