In his interesting opinion piece (Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI, July 27), Ed Newton-Rex glosses over one of the most serious concerns about artificial intelligence: its surveillance potential. Governments have always spied on their subjects/citizens: technology multiplies their spying powers.
In his novel 1984, George Orwell had the authorities install a two-way telescreen system in every Party member’s home, as well as in all workplaces and public spaces. This allowed Big Brother to monitor individuals’ actions and conversations, while he himself remained invisible.
Today’s digital control systems, which operate through electronic tracking devices and voice and facial recognition systems, are simply modernized Big Brother control devices. They allow commercial platforms and intelligence services alike to “mine” and “scrape” information about our thoughts and habits, which we ourselves provide them. This allows them to predict and therefore control our behavior.
No one has yet suggested an effective method for protecting privacy in the face of increased power of state intrusion.
If this is not done, politics will wither and die, because a well-functioning public sphere presupposes the existence of a protected private sphere, where people can pause and reflect without fear of arrest or detention.
Robert Skidelsky
House of lords
In relation to Ed Newton-Rex’s excellent article on the unwelcome nature of artificial intelligence, there is a huge difference between, for example, AI assistance in medical diagnosis, mathematics or stadium design, and AI used in cultural creativity. While there is good art and literature that incorporates AI, the problem arises when systems simply produce material that (badly) imitates art, literature, etc., at the behest of those seemingly ignorant of both, who hold up the insignificant results of AI and pretend that they are suitable as art.
The corollary: they must despise contemporary art and literature to justify their claim to cultural importance for their own value-added insults to intelligence. They risk making us dumb until we accept that AI is, in fact, as good as we are at creative matters. This does great harm to the arts and to “proper” AI, and gives new meaning to the phrase “two cultures.”
Brian Reffin Smith
Berlin Germany
Mr Newton-Rex is right, but even he overlooks the main threat posed by artificial intelligence: its proponents seek to free us from the pesky need to think. sapiens A little about our biological name Homo sapiens. Freed from the heavy burden of thought, we become passive, pupa-like consumers of video entertainment: Homo supina?
Michael Heaton
Warminster, Wiltshire
