The New Year is set to start with a call to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) coming from a man whose views are considered by hundreds of millions of people to be infallible. On New Year’s Day, His Holiness Pope Francis is scheduled to issue a stark warning to the governments of the world on the dangers inherent in AI.
On January 1, 2024, His Holiness will announce: “Techno-scientific advances, by making it possible to exercise hitherto unprecedented control over reality, are placing in human hands a vast array of options, including some that may pose a risk to our survival and endanger our common home”.
Having warned that AI is a threat not to humanity but to the existence of the Planet Earth itself, His Holiness will then exhort “the global community of nations” to urgently adopt a binding international treaty to regulate not only the use of AI, but also its development.
This holy hysteria concerning what is only yet another software product that has been released in beta would be bizarre if it did not echo similar pronouncements from the US President, the U.K. Prime Minister, and the European Union. Politicians, bureaucrats, and the Pope seem to have swallowed the Silicon Valley hard sell surrounding AI hook, line, and sinker while also somehow absorbing purely science-fiction Revenge-of-the-Machines style scenarios such as that which is said to have so impressed US President Joe Biden when he saw the movie blockbuster, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, where the super-villain is an AI program that has gone rogue.
AI bubble to burst in 2024
But while authorities across the West draw up legislation aimed at taming the largely mythical AI monster, industry analysts are warning that 2024 will not be the year when AI spreads its sinister tentacles across the planet and enslaves humanity, but rather the year in which the AI bubble finally bursts. According to a report published by analyst firm CCS Insight in the autumn, generative AI will experience a “cold shower” in 2024, and the technology has been drastically “overhyped.” The report says that, for many organizations, the cost of implementing AI will outweigh any possible benefits. However, The analyst firm added that generative AI will be useful in increasing overall productivity.
There is a real danger that the gulf of misunderstanding between technologists and Western leaders will result in an international web of regulations designed to impose fines that will achieve little more than fattening bureaucratic purses. Overly zealous regulations would inhibit productivity not only in the West, but also in developing countries, where new technologies that increase productivity are urgently needed to feed and clothe growing populations.
However, the wheels of bureaucracy in cities like Brussels, London, and Washington turn slowly. While the US, the U.K., and the EU work to draw up complex sets of overlapping regulations aimed at addressing a global threat that exists largely in the minds of scriptwriters, there may be a window of opportunity in the early months of 2024 for the big players in the AI industry to draw up their own guidelines with an aim of self-regulating the development of AI without government intervention before new legislation can be agreed.
