Sean Thomas

It’s a famous theme in science fiction: the idea that, one day, humanity and the thinking machines will somehow go to war. It’s the narrative spine of The Terminator films. It’s implied in 2001, A Space Odyssey. You can find it in Neuromancer, The Hyperian Cantos, Ex Machina, The Creator and I, Robot (the Asimov stories and subsequent film). In one of the fundamental texts of sci-fi, Frank Herbert’s Dune, this apocalyptic conflict is given a name: the ‘Butlerian Jihad’. Personally, I’ve always dismissed the concept of Butlerian Jihad as fanciful, even as I accept that Artificial General Intelligence – machines as smart as the best of us – is coming at us fast. And yet in recent weeks I’ve started to wonder.

I’m sitting on a stone terrace in the winsome south Breton port of Sainte Marine, which oversees France’s prettiest river (the Odet), and I’m excitedly tucking into a dozen gleaming Morbihan oysters. I am doing this partly because I am writing about travel in Brittany and oysters are very much part of the package here – you come to Brittany, you must consume oysters (also cake, cider, biscuits, tinned sardines and chunky buckwheat crepes). But I’m also eating oysters because I really love oysters. The idea is bad, the texture is worse – slimy, crunchy feathers and bones At this point I imagine a reasonable percentage of Spectator readers will be wincing. Because oysters are a divisive issue.

As locations go, they don’t get more humdrum than the address ‘Carrera 79B, #45D/94’. It is so anonymous it sounds encrypted. Nor, in reality, does it look like anything special: a flat roof, next to a shuttered language school, above a wall of graffiti, in a lower middle-class suburb of another Spanish speaking city. But then you notice the razorwire surrounding the nearby boutique. The armed guard outside the local bank. And you remember why this address, in the inner suburbs of Medellin Colombia, is notorious: this is where fugitive cocaine warlord Pablo Escobar was finally shot by cops in 1993 as he tried to flee across that roof.  Native American empires were bizarrely cruel – even before the Europeans arrived Knowing that, everything looks different.

Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new wave of AI hasn’t really done something simultaneously concrete and astonishing, something where you can draw breath and say ‘Wow, that is definitely replacing this particular job’. In my experience, these AI chatbots respond better if you are polite, an uncanny fact Well, now I can address that.

It’s not easy being a Leaver, right now. For a start, the government that actually delivered Brexit – the present Tory government – is facing a one-sided electoral hammering which will make the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 (duration: 38 minutes) look like a tense, nail-biting score draw. In the same vein, polls consistently show high levels of Bregret and Bremorse, with a hefty majority actively wishing to Rejoin.  If you are reading this and you are in the EU, you might find it trickier In that depressing light – for Brexiteers – let me introduce the ray of sunshine that is ‘Claude’.

Do you remember those far off misty days of yore, when shocking, startling, amazing, disquieting revelations from the world of Artificial Intelligence only arrived every year or two, or even longer? It was about, ooh, a fortnight ago: a wistful, innocent time of smiling boy scouts, and honey for tea, and vicars in bicycle clips, and all we had to worry about was this funny new thing called GPT3. For about an hour after making that ditty I had that chorus ‘You can’t even hijack planes’ spinning in my mind Since then, things have, to say the least, accelerated.

Yeah, I know, ridiculous. Cambodia? How can that be the best country in the entire world? For a start, most people can’t place it on a map. This includes close relatives of mine who are studying geography at A Level. They know all about the Marxist topography of urbanism, but Cambodia, err, um, is that near Africa? Also, Cambodia?? Isn’t that the country that suffered a fearsome Maoist genocide within living memory, with a quarter of its population dying by execution, torture, famine and disease, and the rest left so hungry they resorted to eating giant spiders roasted in tomato powder? The landscape is agreeably green, the jungles are often untouched, the islands can be Edenic (but primitive) Well yes, it is.

It’s difficult to remember a time before climate change – a time when our daily discourse, our newspaper front pages, endless movies and TV documentaries, and Al Gore, Greta Thunberg and Sir David Attenborough (Peace Be Upon Him), were not lecturing us, sternly and constantly, about the threat to our planet from the ‘climate emergency’, the melting of the ice caps, the levelling of the Amazon jungle, the failure of the Gulf Stream, the desertification of Spain, and the complete and total cessation of snowfall in Great Britain, apart from the regular occasions when it snows.  In fact, if you are under 30 you may not even be aware that there was a time when we didn’t vex about Anthropogenic Global Warming.

When they come to write the history of the AI revolution, there’s a good chance that the writers will devote many chapters to the early 2020s. Indeed, such is the pace, scale and wildness of the development, it is possible entire books will be devoted to, say, what happened in the last week or so. This is happening now, not in some dystopian future If you’ve not been paying attention, let me talk you through it. On 15 February Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Hassabis, the head tech bro at DeepMind (the London-based AI company bought by Google in 2014) announced the launch of Gemini Ultra 1.5 Pro. It may sound like a slightly superior razor-blade, in truth it is a very serious machine. To demo Gemini 1.

In 1988, I lived on the backpackery Khaosan Road, Bangkok, in a hotel which offered heroin on room service. It went like this: in the morning, you padded down the teakwood stairs to the little kitchen and you asked the pretty Thai girl for breakfast – scrambled eggs, bacon, ‘extras’. Ten minutes later the same sweet girl would arrive in your room and graciously set down your tray, with scrambled eggs, orange juice – plus two straws of China White heroin, neatly paired on a saucer.

It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement. Pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy, freedom, and happy sexuality Except, perhaps, this time.