In 1997 the world chess champion Garry Kasparov was beaten by an IBM computer system called Deep Blue. It had defied all expectations, exploring some 300 million possible moves in one second. The most that skilled chess players can contemplate is about 110 moves at any given time.
It was a seminal moment in the advance of artificial intelligence – even if not fully understood, writes Richard Susskind in How to Think About AI. People did not wholly grasp the impact of the exponential power of computers, nor that new ways would be found to develop systems that could achieve human expert-level performance.
Fast forward to 2016 and to AlphaGo, a machine designed to play the complex game Go, which has more possible moves than atoms in the observable universe. That year, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, a world-class Go player, by four games to one.
Further advances followed, until ChatGPT in 2022, and what Susskind describes as ‘the most remarkable breakthrough in my 40 years of working on AI’. This was also a milestone in public recognition of the potential of AI systems. ChatGPT – a chatbot that mimics human conversation – can answer almost any question in ordinary language. Classified as ‘generative’ AI, it can produce content on demand. And not just text: similar systems generate art, music, video and even high-quality code-writing software.
This brave new world generates amazement – but, with it, alarm. Susskind’s timely book comes as the country’s leading artists, actors, musicians and writers, backed by newspapers and other publishers, are running a campaign to highlight the threat posed by unregulated AI to their industries.
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