Alistair Stewart and Joseph Miller call for a pause

ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) is as much of a threat to the human race as climate change, campaigners said at a protest billed as the start of a worldwide fightback against a new breed of bots on the brink of becoming “smarter than Einstein”.

The “Pause AI” demonstration against the pace of developments in the industry was held outside the £400million offices of the tech giant Google’s AI wing, DeepMind, in Handyside Street, King’s Cross.

There are growing concerns from scientists and experts in the field that “machine-learning” algorithms are advancing at a speed that is outstripping regulatory powers held by governments, and that society is reaching a tipping point once only depicted in dystopian films like James Cameron’s Terminator 2.

Two campaigners, who had set up a banner and table top stall with academic papers and chocolate brownies, stressed they were not targeting the company exclusively.

Alistair Stewart, a 27-year-old masters student, said: “A few years ago, people were saying it would be decades before AI was as intelligent as humans. Now some people are saying no – it’s years or maybe even months away.

“In terms of the urgency of the problem, the development of artificial intelligence is plausibly a bigger threat to humanity’s existence than climate change.

“We have experts at these AI labs are saying that AI could be the most likely cause of human extinction. And our economy is not set up to deal with the disruption AI is already causing, and will continue to cause.”

He spoke about a recent article in the New York Times by the Sapiens author, Yuval Noah Harari, who said that algorithms which select the content we see in our social media feeds, were “humanity’s first contact with AI”, adding: “And we lost that battle, and are continuing to lose it. Think of societal polarisation, echo chambers, social media addiction, mental health problems, and a loss of trust in our information systems. The AI systems that these companies are developing are potentially far more powerful.”

Companies in nearly every industry are already at least exploring how AI can speed up their work. Some newspaper websites are already publishing content written by a ‘bot’.

It has been estimated in some quarters that any occupation that has any contact with a computer is at risk in some way.

Oh how we laughed! A Terminator-style robot editing the Tribune in the near future – the image was created using AI

The protest was coinciding with ones outside “AI labs” in San Francisco and Brussels and came on the day that the UK news agenda was dominated by human jobs at British Telecom being replaced by AI alternatives.

The company’s plan to shed 55,000 workers is the latest real world example of how human roles in the workplace are threatened by developments in AI.

Fears for the future have stoked campaigns for a “universal basic income” to be put in place to protect wages of workers who might find themselves redundant in the next stage of a tech revolution.

Last month an open letter, signed by Tesla boss Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, called for a six-month moratorium on work being done in “AI labs” so that regulators can urgently impose new safeguards to protect society from future potential risks.

The Future of Life Institute behind the open letter had said that if properly managed, technologies had the ability to treat and eradicate diseases, strengthen democratic processes, and mitigate – or even halt – climate change.

But if improperly managed, they could do the opposite, bringing about “catastrophic events that bring humanity to its knees, perhaps even pushing us to the brink of extinction”.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak has set up a taskforce to look into how to limit the pace of change and this week said new regulatory “guard rails” were being set up.

Fears over developments in the tech world were once the domain of the elderly who struggled to work smart phones and pay bills on the internet. But now more and more young people are getting worried about what the world will be like when they grow older.

The other protester, Joseph Miller, a 23-year-old research engineer in the AI field, said: “One of the scary things about AI, the more dangerous it gets the more fun and useful it gets, then at some point it goes the other way.

“People talk about something called AI ‘take off’. At some point, the AI starts to improve itself and this can lead to a very rapid feedback loop of AI making smarter AI, and then making smarter AI, and then making smarter AI. It can go from developing at a human pace, to AI suddenly becoming smarter than Albert Einstein.”

He added: “Climate change started with experts raising concerns. Now that is where we are now with AI. Top experts are raising concerns – and it is now trickling down.”

DeepMind is credited with inventing tech that could learn to play computer games from scratch and then master them. Its program was the first to beat a professional Go player.

We were unable to get a comment from DeepMind but its website states: “At the heart of this mission is our commitment to act as responsible pioneers in the field of AI, in service of society’s needs and expectations.

“AI can provide extraordinary benefits, but like all technology, it can have negative impacts unless it’s built and used responsibly.

“How can AI benefit society without reinforcing bias or unfairness? How can we build ­computer systems that invent new ideas, but also reliably behave in ways we want? We help anticipate short and long-term risks, explore ways to prevent these risks from happening, and find ways to address them if they do.”