OVER THE LAST YEAR, CHATBOTS WRITing half-decent poems and a series of apocalyptic pronouncements regarding AI have plunged us into a civilisational moment. Two main concerns have emerged from a mixture of panic and hype fed by everyone from Rishi Sunak to Elon Musk. First, will it take my job? And second, will it really eventually wipe us all out?
Probably not, is the answer given by Cambridge’s inaugural DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning Neil D. Lawrence. The Atomic Human is his grand attempt not just to explain what AI is, but to use it as a means to better understand human intelligence. His mission is quasi-religious: “As machines slice away proportions of human capability,” he writes, we will come to be left with a “kernel of humanity”. It’s this…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024