Roy Morgan recently published a report that sounded alarmist: 25% of Australians believe Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents a risk of human extinction in the next 20 years, up from 20% only 2 years earlier. It wasn’t until I sat down and thought about it that it became clear how much AI has already made inroads, and we haven’t really noticed. It’s worth reflecting on where we are at, and where we are heading, at breakneck speed.
Just think about your everyday activities. Contact many call centres and going through the options menus (especially using voice) is probably one of the areas we have all noticed the march of the machines. Had a Teams meeting recently with minutes provided by AI and a fairly accurate summary provided (all a bit wordy but covered off on everything). My mobile phone knows when I’m leaving work to head home and estimates my travel time to the minute. Navigation apps plan your trip with continuous updates factoring in information from other devices.
Internet searches and ads pop up, and the more conspiracy theorists amongst us have noticed conversations about something we’ve never been interested in before gets overheard by the “dormant” mobile device leading to ads appearing. Co-incidence?
Our accounting program gives recommendations for matching both incoming funds and payments against invoices. Self-driving cars, basic (so far) legal assistance like conveyancing, interpretation of medical results and recommending treatment plans, more sinister applications like deepfakes and malware for criminal purposes, military applications, tailoring of news and social media content to align with your view and interests, AI dating aps had relationships with real people – all these things already permeate and control our lives.
Back to the Roy Morgan research, 65% (up 8% points since 2023) believe “overall, artificial intelligence creates more problems than it solves”. Generalising, the most sceptical are women, older, and in regional areas. Those who are more supportive of AI see the benefits mainly in higher productivity, learning and medical progress; whereas those opposed see problems with loss of thinking skills, inaccuracy and misinformation, and environmental harm. I’m never a fence sitter, but have to say I agree with both sides on all points…
The research also identified what I think is the crux of the matter: people want policies and controls to guide development and protect against misuse. AI is already smarter than the average human, and we should reflect on that AI has no feelings, morals or other attributes that make humans human. So basically what is there to stop AI doing what it likes, especially when it already controls communication, information, and indeed many functions in our society?
Small Government always beats overreach, but it is very clear that one thing Governments should be doing (but have barely started) is to put a framework around AI. Not holding my breath though, as they can’t even work out how to stop internet crime in any form. Any time I deal with a bank the required information to prove my identity is quite invasive, yet when someone steals money from our accounts to theirs – they can’t find the person/s who received the money?
Going down the conspiracy theory path, it’s actually possible that the Terminator movie was travelling back in time to warn us about all this. Even now, it would be very easy to bring our society back to the stone age literally in the flick of a switch. Companies and Government departments get hacked increasingly frequently, it has to be only a matter of time before someone manages to zero out all the balances in bank accounts, or put a ransom to release infrastructure like power grids, communications networks etc.
This is not loony tin-hat stuff, even though it seems incredible. Recently Alistair MacGibbon (former adviser to PM Malcolm Turnbull and now Chief Strategy Officer at security company CyberCX) told a cyber summit in Sydney that millions of Chinese made internet-connected devices, including vehicles, can be remotely disabled and controlled (especially electric ones, where they can also disable the safety feature during charging that stops explosions – in 6 years Australia has already had more than 265,000 vehicles registered).
This is not crazy talk. A year ago nobody had really thought old technology like pagers could be used as a deadly weapon. In the US, they looked into the cause of grid blackouts and discovered spyware equipment in power inverters used in solar farms, wind farms and batteries. Reuters also reported in November last year that numerous solar inverters had been remotely deployed from the US’s major trading adversary to freeze the grid. Cars with this technology are already used for surveillance and can even be deliberately crashed.
Just think back only a month or so ago, and a human error at Optus caused 000 calls to not work through their network for a period (but still worked through other networks), and the outrage that sparked. We ain’t seen nothing yet if you consider what sitting ducks we have become should control be lost to aggressive powers or artificial bodies with no heart.
We are already becoming a slave to the machine, and you can’t stop “progress”. As we are now starting to accept autonomous vehicles, perhaps it’s time for those smarter than me to explain who is actually driving, and what the destination is? I’ve always been an advocate that we should only have 24/7 stable and reliable power supply, but surely our Governments have a better plan to stop the future “rage of the machine” than to rely on a grid to collapse due to intermittent weather conditions (one thing neither humans nor machines will ever control)?
Words from the wise
“You can not escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today” – Abraham Lincoln
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. That’s why it’s called the present” – Eleanor Roosevelt, but many think “Kung Fu Panda”.
As always, Onwards and Upwards!
Fred Carlsson
General Manager
