Steven Poole

The balance of power between humans and machines

Robert Skidelsky dismisses the possibility of our annihilation by a superintelligent computer system, since ‘science tells us that we cannot create such a being’. But does it?

[Getty Images] 
issue 18 November 2023

The twin poles of the modern imaginarium about technology and society can be represented by two masterpieces of popular culture. In James Cameron’s film The Terminator (1984) and its sequels, a global computer system called Skynet becomes sentient and proceeds to try to exterminate the human race by means of time-travelling Austrian bodybuilders. In Iain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ novels, by contrast (beginning with Consider Phlebas, 1987), a space-faring humanlike species has created superintelligent machines, known as Minds, which automate all the labour of production, leaving people free to pursue artistic activities and extreme sports. As our tech-bro overlords race to create proper AI, then, the present question is whether engineered superintelligence will lead to annihilation or fully automated luxury communism.

It takes the eminent economist Robert Skidelsky quite a while to arrive at this question, and he mentions Banks only in passing (in a dismissive reference to the fact that the novels have inspired Elon Musk), and The Terminator not at all – which is strange since ‘building Skynet’ has become acknowledged shorthand for the dangers of creating a superintelligent computer system, supposing that is possible.

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