To misquote PG Wodehouse, it is never difficult to distinguish the Daily Telegraph from a ray of sunshine. ‘The four horsemen of the apocalypse are coming for the UK economy!’ that venerable newspaper boomed this week.
Still, as the journalist Francis Wheen joked, ‘some things are true even though the Daily Telegraph says they are true’. One of those infernal equestrians is of course artificial intelligence, which reportedly threatens to limber up for the annihilation of humanity by tanking global stock markets.
Forgive the gallows humour. Like nearly everyone, including almost all politicians and journalists, I have no idea whether AI superintelligence could wipe out the species, perhaps as soon as 2029. It is tempting to shrug one’s shoulders and put the kettle on.
I am on safer ground in suggesting governments are right to take a much keener interest, amid the usual contrary pleas to let rip the animal spirits of capitalism.
Two of the Gazette’s esteemed columnists reflect on the matter this week. Joshua Rozenberg (p12) flags the latest tome by renowned legal futurologist Professor Richard Susskind, The Future of Law (30th anniversary edition). Susskind notes tech companies believe they will deliver a version of AGI between 2030 and 2035. Yet for all their boosterism about AI, ‘hardly any lawyers understand its likely impact, least of all on the young trainees and associates they are now recruiting’.
Jonathan Goldsmith, meanwhile, issues a clarion call for action in his weekly blog (tinyurl.com/4295zmv6). ‘What has all this to do with lawyers?’, he asks. ‘The future racing towards us – unregulated superintelligent AI – is one without law, without the rule of law, without access to justice and without liability, maybe already beyond the reach of regulation.’ Global bars must speak out about the dangers facing us, Goldsmith declares.
From the apocalyptic to the prosaic. Today’s Gazette also delivers a grassroots insight into how AI is changing the behaviour of law firm clients, which is bringing all sorts of complications (Private client roundtable, p22.). I was taken by the story of the solicitor presented with a folder of hallucinated AI slop, who felt compelled to deliver a tutorial on where the machines had erred. Do you charge for that kind of thing?
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