The Garrulous Jay – Optimistic Intelligence

Neil Lawrence is a truly remarkable man. He is currently the DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge and Senior AI Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute.

Last night I was lucky enough to attend a lecture given by Professor Lawrence titled How AI Works and How it will Transform our Lives.

The best thing about the lecture was that it didn’t really address the subject on which he was asked to speak! A more appropriate title might have been, The Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence and What we can Do About Them.

Trying to distil the arguments put forward in the talk into four hundred words is a challenge made potentially greater by not being able to rely upon AI for assistance – I didn’t record the talk – but that represents a good starting point.

Lawrence was unequivocally optimistic about the enormous benefits that we will all derive from fast-evolving large language models. He encouraged us all to use them, as indeed many of us already do in our daily lives, both at home and at work.

He argued that if our greatest fear is being deprived of the ability to control how these technologies are used, and that we therefore risk being controlled by them and the companies that develop them, then it is by using them that we can best push back against these concerns.

In Lawrence’s view it is by embracing AI that we start to gain the understanding and power required to correct the misalignment that currently exists between what most people want the technology to do for us, and what the companies developing it want it to do for them.

Linked to this he urged the older generations not to infect those younger than them with a pessimism borne out of the view that, “they will never find a job because all the jobs will be replaced by AI”.

We should instead be drawing on our experience to encourage, inspire and build confidence in young people. He observed that in the same way as machines replaced physical labour in the past, AI may replace mental labour in the future, but that this can free up time to engage in more productive activities derived from communication and collaboration between people.

As Lawrence put it, “use AI to make nurses 30% more efficient in their work, but then don’t sack a third of them, encourage them to share ideas and knowledge”.

He pointed out that when he left University the department he had studied in hardly had a computer, but thirty years later “he’d done alright”!

Whilst acknowledging the risks any new technology brings with it, Lawrence was dismissive of AI or Artificial General Intelligence somehow “replacing” humans. As he pointed out, it completely lacks empathy, consciousness or our collective cultural memory, and it cannot replicate those. AI is “psychopathic” and lacks spirituality or indeed mortality.

As someone who works in a profoundly people-based business I was reassured.