Ai

As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then enter one of the Inns of Court as a trainee barrister, before embarking on a period of pupillage. If all goes well, you may be called to the bar. Play your cards right and you might take silk, and then as you reach your fifties, with a following wind, you may be invited to become a judge. Ten years later, with a few widely admired judgments under your belt, you may reasonably claim to be a ‘top judge’. If I am to endure the peculiarly dysfunctional queue at Gail’s, I want choice. Where is the cornbread? The alternative is to become a minor local magistrate and get caught in flagrante with a farm animal.

What is happening in Gaza now provides a glimpse of how all wars may be fought in the future — with artificial intelligence. In The Spectator last November, I wrote about an Israeli airstrike that brought down a six-story building in Gaza City, reportedly killing more than forty civilians. One of the residents, a man named Mahmoud Ashour, dug through the rubble with his bare hands, trying to find his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two and six months — all killed. The Israeli military would not tell me why the building was hit, beyond saying that Gaza’s armed groups put their military infrastructure amid civilians, but Amnesty International said there had been a single member of Hamas living there.

The artificial intelligence space is strange. Significantly overfunded, overhyped and overcovered — in part because AI can easily produce bad, generic copywriting, which is how many journalists presently earn their livelihoods. Though AI tools have rapidly advanced over the past year, few look to be truly society-morphing, and it’s fairly obvious when something is a product of AI, or it hasn’t mattered. Do you really care if a cliché-ridden cover letter was produced by an unimaginative human mind or a chatbot? But Thursday’s announcement of OpenAI’s new video-creating tool, Sora, is something different.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the first and biggest tech convention of the year, took place earlier this month, where the strangest, newest products were shown off. As usual, there was a lot of fluff — pointless gizmos that work on a show floor but never make it to stores — but there were also core signs of the technology trends we’re going to see this year, and products I’m excited to try. Screens are always a strong point at CES, and this year proved no different, from pure quantum dot prototypes, translucent televisions and yet another laptop with a glasses-free 3D display; but it’s the arrival of great OLED screens to mainstream laptops that truly excites me.