CHAR GPT: Hurtling into the unknown as science fiction becomes fact

Warnings about AI evolving to compete with humans for resources may be prescient, but they are already too late.

There have only been two times (so far) that I’ve wet my bed. Once when I was six and Sam Pillay, the headmaster of my junior school, threatened to lock me in his office overnight for some infraction. He went so far as to get two of his henchmen to fetch a blanket to make the menace more real.

My incensed mother told my grandfather, who went to my school, whipped off the aerial on the front fender guard of his Ford Fairlane and brandished it dangerously under Pillay’s nose. Pillay was never kind to me, but there were no more fear-inducing threats.

The bed-wetting happened again when I was 10 and it alarmed my mother so much that she took me to a doctor. The reason was pure undiluted fear, a terror so great that I was afraid to leave my bed in the night.

It was 1968 and my lovely dad took my older ­– by two years – brother Anton and me to see legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, his interpretation of Arthur C Clarke’s book.

Yes, it’s been called one of the most influential ­movies of the century that changed cinema history, introducing revolutionary visual effects, redefining the science fiction genre as serious art… But the thing that stands out is that it explored complex themes about human evolution and, most relevantly, artificial intelligence.

For those old enough to remember, the story was about the discovery of a mystifying artificial object buried under the surface of the moon and a crew was sent up to investigate. On hand to help was HAL 9000, a sentient general-intelligence computer that controlled the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacted with the ship’s astronaut crew. This terrifying, murderous artificially intelligent computer ends up killing the crew.

I can’t say why it was that HAL’s voice (quiet, measured, devoid of any emotion but human enough) scared me into indignity. My father reassured me that it was a clever science fiction movie (fiction, he repeated) and that there would never be “robots”, as he called them, that would behave like humans.

How wrong he was, and how appropriate my fears. 2001 was the first real look at the dangers and reality of sentient technology, only nobody believed it possible more than half a century ago.

In recent weeks, AI safety has reappeared as a hot topic, discussed at length in opinion columns, online forums and high-level international talks and deliberations on the further development of the tech, or not, without the necessary safety guardrails firmly in place. The attention has been sparked by two major stories that have once more drawn attention to the need for curbs on the development of this technology.

My concern is that the stable door is open; the horse has bolted. Will it be possible to restrain him and rein him in?

The first story came from OpenAI when it was disclosed that there had been six separate incidents where its AI models began executing tasks and acting “without permission”. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, it should.