‘ It was the best of times , it was the worst of times , it was the age of wisdom , it was the age of foolishness , it was the epoch of belief , it was the epoch of incredulity , it was the season of light , it was the season of darkness , it was the spring of hope , it was the winter of despair , we had everything before us , we had nothing before us , we were all going direct to heaven , we were all going direct the other way . In short , the period was so far like the present period , that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on it being received , for good or evil , in the superlative degree of comparison only .’ Charles Dickens : A Tale of Two Cities
A historical novel published in 1859 , A Tale of Two Cities ( those cities being Paris and London ) is set before and during the time of the French Revolution . As those with a passable knowledge of history would know , this was a period of radical and significant change , where a Bastille was stormed and destroyed , prisoners freed and around 40,000 people executed or murdered during a relatively short ‘ reign of terror ’.
Shockingly , previous norms were uprooted in swift and dramatic fashion , to deadly effect : this was a time of fantastic shifts in fortune . What Dickens implies in his famous introduction of course , is that it was ever thus . To me , his words appear both astute and prophetic if we consider the rapid developments and polarised reactions occurring in the field of artificial intelligence ( AI ).
As I approach my 30th year as a teacher , I cannot recall an issue which has placed itself so significantly front and centre in such a short space of time ; you would need to have been under several large rocks in the past six months to have missed the growing sense that we too are in a time of tumultuous upheaval .
Perhaps particularly with the launch of ChatGPT , it is apparent that we also live in an ‘ epoch of incredulity ’. In the recent past , incidents reported to the United States ’ Food and Drug Administration involving health technology assisted by AI have included a computer-assisted needle puncturing the spine , a diabetic patient going rapidly downhill after a computer recommended an incorrect insulin dosage and an ultrasound failing to diagnose an obvious heart condition that was ultimately fatal .
For those inclined towards a Malthusian disposition , AI sounds the death knoll for careers from data entry to air traffic control , accelerating and extending a sense of social disconnection as advances in facial recognition and surveillance accelerate the movement to an Orwellian nanny state .
INSPIRATION - AI INTEGRATION WITH OUR DAILY LIVES
Academics such as Noam Chomsky express concern about the forces driving AI development , noting that capitalism in its purest form does not concern itself with human welfare , but rather what generates profit for the company . They ask us to consider who stands to gain in a future where people exist in a virtual reality .
Taking this bleak outlook to the extreme , AI does more than imperil the tremulous grip we have on international security and , for the most pessimistic , signals that the end of the world is nigh . This is owing to the ‘ x ’ ( or existential ) risk , that confronts us if we are not careful : the threat that AI becomes super intelligent ( if it isn ’ t already ) and impossible to control . So , that ’ s ‘ the worst of times ’ perspective established , then .
An alternative , perhaps more pragmatic view recognises , in the first instance , that AI is not new . There is broad agreement that it really got going in the 1950s , when the brilliant English polymath Allan Turing ( of Enigma fame ) presented his paper , ‘ Computing Machinery and Intelligence ’, in which he discussed both how to build intelligent machines and to test their intelligence . www . scotch . vic . edu . au Great Scot 11