COMMENT
Business Buzz
with Harry Pearson
How Barnard Castle led the rise of the robots
Elsewhere in this issue, you can read an interview with Peter Wilcock of Latos, the firm building an AI data centre in Stockton. This will be using large language model graphics processing units to generate images, videos and 3D graphics. Well, that’ s what Google AI tells me anyway – because expecting anyone who hit 30 when the internet was still called“ the information superhighway” to keep up with tech is like expecting your labradoodle to open a child-proof bottle and give you a paracetamol.
Most people I know are instinctively afraid of AI. They believe it will one day enslave us all. They could be right. In the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, cynical coding genius Bertrand Gilfoyle observes that,“ AI is starting to operate on levels we don’ t even understand. Elon Musk himself gives humanity a 5 % shot at surviving AI and he’ s a Disney-level optimist.”
The notion that machines will one day take over running the world is something mankind has lived in terror of for at least a century. Although when you look at the mess we have made of the planet, you might wonder what we are so afraid of. After all, no matter how sophisticated it becomes, it seems unlikely that AI will ever be able to fully mimic the babbling balderdash of human idiocy.
As it happens, Teesside has a long history when it comes to this sort of thing. The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle is home to one of the world’ s first robots – though admittedly it doesn’ t look much like the sort of slick replicants we imagine dominating our future. The mechanical Silver Swan that performs daily in the foyer was created by the Belgian John Joseph Merlin in 1773. When the American author Mark Twain saw it, he wrote that the bird“ had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eye”. The swan was the direct descendant of a duck designed in 1739 by Jacques de Vaucanson that flapped its wings, stretched out its neck, pecked and swallowed a beak-full of wheat, then drank some water. After that settled, the duck itself, with a quack, jumped up and – to the astonishment of the audience – pooped onto a silver dish.
Vaucanson’ s Duck amazed the watching Louis XV and philosopher Voltaire pronounced himself dumbfounded,
The future is here – but apparently we’ ll still need to tie its shoelaces. AI image of Harry Pearson with his AI overlord and the Bowes Museum’ s mechanical Silver Swan.
crediting the bird’ s maker with breathing life into a mass of metal and rubber tubing. The animated fowl was, most observers agreed,“ The greatest masterpiece of mechanics that humankind has ever created.” Others speculated wildly on what might follow. For if Vaucanson could build a duck that digested food, might he not also create a bird that breathed, whose heart beat, that grew and laid eggs that hatched tiny versions of itself? The duck raised questions about the nature of existence.
Clockwork machines like the Bowes Museum Swan and Vaucanson’ s Duck were known as“ androides”, though the word didn’ t come into common currency until Victorian times. That was thanks to a novel by Frenchman Auguste Villiers de l’ Isle Adam. The Future Eve charts the love affair between an English nobleman and a beautiful mechanical woman, a plotline picked up by former Hartlepool College student Ridley Scott in the movie Blade Runner – the design of which, you won’ t need reminding, was based on Billingham ICI at night. Through science, the fantasies of artists often become our future reality. There’ s a direct line from the silver swan to the AI data centre.
So, what might we expect our lives to be like in 2050? Well, last year I interviewed one of the Oxbridge academics responsible for developing the advanced linguistic tools for DeepMind. He told me that while it is now quite easy to make a robot that can play chess like a grandmaster, it is considerably harder to make one that can tie its shoelaces. This, then, could be our future. Assuming, of course, that our new AI masters don’ t wear sliders.
Harry Pearson’ s latest book The Farther Corner – A Sentimental Return to North-East Football is out now.
150 | Tees Business