Sean Thomas

If the success of a new technology can be measured by the speed of uptake, there is no denying the epochal impact of ChatGPT. Within five days of its launch in late November, the artificial intelligence chatbot, which can provide clear, detailed answers to human questions, was being used by a million people. Now it’s used by 100 million, with a growing waiting list of those looking for a chance to try it. Even the mighty Google has allegedly issued a ‘Code Red’, realising that a machine which can answer any question without having to send you off to some unreliable websites might pose a threat to its search-engine business model. Bill Gates has said that ChatGPT is equivalent to the first PC. Others have claimed it’s akin to the dawning of the internet.

As a rule, ‘I told you so’ is an unattractive sentiment – simultaneously egotistic, narcissistic and triumphalist. Nonetheless, on this occasion: I told you so. Specifically, I told you so on 10 December last year, when I predicted in Spectator Life that 2023 might see humanity encounter its first non-human intellect, in the form of true artificial intelligence – or something so close to it that any caveats will appear quite trivial.

In the deliciously darkened corners of the Vesper cocktail bar, in the central quartier of the Siamese capital known as Silom, the patrons are guzzling some of the finest cocktails east of Suez: from the exquisite complexities of the 'Silver Aviation' (Roku gin, prosecco, maraschino, coffee-walnut bitters, almond and lavender cordial), all the way to the heady simplicity of the 'Mango Manhattan' (bourbon, vermouth, white port, absinthe). What’s more, everyone seems to be having a good time. Which is maybe not surprising – this place was recently ranked the 14th best bar in all Asia (by the same people that bring you the World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Hotels etc), and the top-of-the-class cocktails are quite considerately priced at around £12 a pop.

I’m a 30th generation Cornishman. I’m so Cornish my mum can make Cornish pasties blindfolded, my maternal grandmother was employed aged nine to break rocks in a Cornish tin mine (she was a ‘bal maiden’), and my second cousins founded Cornish Solidarity, which is the very-lightly-armed wing of Mebyon Kernow (the Cornish Plaid Cymru). Nonetheless my visits to the county are infrequent, probably because I am not overly fond of rain.  However, on my most recent visit I noticed that something in Cornwall has changed.

Unless you’ve been living under a snowdrift – with no mobile signal – for the past six months, you’ll have heard of the kerfuffle surrounding the new generations of artificial intelligence. Especially a voluble, dutiful, inexhaustible chatbot called ChatGPT, which has gone from zero users to several million in the two wild weeks since its inception. Speculation about ChatGPT ranges from the curious, to the gloomy, to the seriously angry. Some have said it is the death of Google, because it is so good at providing answers to queries – from instant recipes comprising all the ingredients you have in your fridge right now (this is brilliant) to the definition of quantum physics in French (or Latin, or Armenian, or Punjabi, or – one memorable day for me – Sumerian).

If you had to choose an obvious place to look for clues about what will happen in the coming year, it probably wouldn’t be the lush, green, watery tropic wilderness of Mount Borradaile, West Arnhemland, in the Northern Territory, Australia, hard by the sizzling blue reaches of the Arafura Sea. For a start, this lost, ancient chunk of Oz is almost empty – there are far more saltwater crocs than cars, and far more rare and exquisite wading birds than people. How can this lovely place speak of modernity? Of the future? And yet if I am right, the clues hidden in this Edenic wilderness suggest that we are about to see our lives entirely overturned – in a way that once happened in Arnhemland. The rocks may even illuminate our ultimate fate.

All-day diners feasting on the full English, the cheese omelette or the celebrated sausage sandwich (£3.80) at George’s Café, at 36 Blythe Road, Hammersmith, probably don’t realise they are dining at an address which is pivotal in global cultural history. So pivotal, in fact, that it might just tell us whether human civilisation is about to be extinguished in a nuclear holocaust. A claim like that needs fleshing out. Here it is.

A few months back I wrote a Spectator piece about a phenomenal new ‘neural network’ – a subspecies of artificial intelligence – which promises to revolutionise art and how humans interact with art. The network is called Dall-e 2, and it remains a remarkable chunk of not-quite-sentient tech. However, such is the astonishing, accelerating speed of development in AI, Dall-e 2 has already been overtaken. And then some.  Just last week a British company called Stability AI launched an artificial intelligence model which has been richly fed, like a lean greyhound given fillet steak, on several billion images, equipping it to make brand new images when prompted by a linguistic message.

Earlier this year, quite unexpectedly (and for personal reasons too tedious to share), I was forced to be outside the UK for ‘a while’. At the outset, I had no idea how long my exile might be: maybe weeks, maybe months. To add to the ambiguity, I had no particular place to go, except two already arranged travel writing trips of a week each (in the USA and Greece). So I decided: why not make a pleasing virtue of necessity? Why not, at the age of 58, do a geriatric version of a gap year, wandering freely about the globe? And that is exactly what I did. I packed my suitcase, headed out, and let whimsy and the weather dictate where I went next.