About Cheryll Barron

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Posts by Cheryll Barron

Let the accelerating AI annexation stay regulation-free as ‘it’s just version 2.0 of the Industrial Revolution’? Geoffrey Hinton, the newest physics Nobelist, is telling us why that’s a fool’s argument

. AI and theatrical misdirection, Regulation of Big Tech . , , , , , , , , , ,

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A jumping caption problem: the speaker was not, of course, Geoffrey Hinton but an astonished Sajid Javid

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Reader, may your 2025 begin well, continue better and make you resolute. 

May you be especially determined and resilient if you can see this as an all-hands-on-deck time unless you don’t mind watching what we dread most about the AI revolution coming true. A time of orcs and goblins when saying simply ‘our’ is less apt to make minds switch off than talking about ‘humanity,’ particularly when the h-word is joined to ‘extinction,’ because we’re also in an age of acute, enfeebling threat fatigue. 

They were notably paired in a conversation on BBC Radio 4 last Friday in which Sajid Javid, a former British government minister acting as guest editor, did his best to tilt the AI research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton’s vision of our AI-shaped future from dystopian to cheerily utopian — bringing us all ‘longer, happier and healthier lives’. 

Just like a politician, a slab of beef in every crockpot and a Tesla in every garage! you might have snapped irritably. But this one’s unusual. Born a bus-driver’s son in a provincial English city, he is estimated to have taken a ninety-eight per cent cut in salary in giving up a banking career for politics. He has remained likably bloke-y and unaffected in spite of being appointed to at least five ministerial posts in the UK cabinet, at different times, including chancellor of the exchequer, and being entitled to put a ‘sir’ before his name for audiences that understand Britain’s public honours system. 

As investors’ cash pours into AI like a defective flash flood without a celestial shutoff valve, governments worrying about slow economic growth, including the UK’s, are under ferocious — all but brutal — pressure to allow Big AI to do what it likes. 

This was already happening last January, when the right-of-centre party to which ‘Sir Saj’ belongs was in power. In a short news item Private Eye — the satirical magazine and only high-profile print publication still distinguishing itself for serious, difficult, complex investigative journalism — reported, with its usual breezy insouciance, on lobbying in Britain’s parliament by Silicon Valley’s A16Z, referred to there as Andreessen-Horowitz. Notoriously the most aggressive AI advocate in top-tier venture capital, the firm had the ear of a Tory prime minister a year ago and must now be reckoned with by today’s Labour leaders — just as liable to turn puce when reading some updated version of this:

Following founder Marc Andreessen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, the company says in its submission that ‘big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can’, ‘development of open-source code should continue to be unregulated’, and that any potential risks posed by AI should be mitigated by, er, ‘using AI to maximise society’s defensive capabilities’. 

So AI is going to regulate AI … 

— Private Eye 1615, 19 January – 1 February 2024

It is over-confidence — or arrogance — on that scale that Geoffrey Hinton has been opposing in recent speeches and interviews, as when he spoke for about three minutes on 10 December at the Nobel banquet in Stockholm in honour of his physics prize. Remarkably, no one seems to have noticed that he is the only Silicon Valley scientist — he led Google’s research into deep learning for ten years — to have been so ennobled in Sweden.

The transcript below could contain minor errors, even if the transcriber paid special attention to nuance, hesitations and emphasis. The BBC’s own record of the exchange is set to be removed from its website soon, with the rest of the three hour-plus episode of the 27 December Radio 4 Today programme of which it is part. 

The thought-provoking reference to Charles Dickens in it is presumably about extreme social inequality: the man in the street’s limited defences against pitiless exploitation and near-absolute control by members of the ruling class in mid-1800s England. Not the least Dickensian in the other sense — referring to humour or divine caricature.

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SAJID JAVID : I wonder whether you thought when you started this work that this is where we would be now.

GEOFFREY HINTON : I didn’t think that it would be where we are now. I thought at some point in the future we would get here. 

Because the situation we’re in now is that most of the experts in the field think that some time within probably the next twenty years we’re gonna develop AIs that are smarter than people. And that’s a very scary thought.

SAJID JAVID : Well, I’d read somewhere that — [ laughs ] I know this is a really silly way to put it, but — humans were something like 10,000 times-plus smarter than the goldfish. And an ASI — artificial super-intelligence — could be 10,000 times more intelligent than a human. 

Is that the kind of thing we’re talking about?

GEOFFREY HINTON : It’s not clear what times means in that context. I like to think of it as imagine yourself and a three year-old. We’ll be the three year-old, they’ll be the grownup. 

SAJID JAVID : Do you think people and sort of society generally realise the profound change that is coming? You know, I’ve referred to the change AI will bring on par with the — sort of creation of the wheel and fire. Do you think it could go that far? 

GEOFFREY HINTON : Oh yeah. Yes. I think it’s like the Industrial Revolution. In the Industrial Revolution human strength ceased to be that relevant because machines were just stronger. If you wanted to dig a ditch you dug it with a machine. 

What we’ve got now is something that’s replacing human intelligence. And just ordinary human intelligence will not be at the cutting edge any more, it will be machines.

SAJID JAVID : What do you think life will be like ten to twenty years from now?

GEOFFREY HINTON : It will depend on what our political systems do with this technology. So my big worry at present is that we’re in a situation where we need to be very careful, very thoughtful, about developing a potentially very dangerous technology. 

It’s gonna have lots of wonderful effects in health care. And in almost every industry, it’s going to make things more efficient. But we need to be very careful in the development of it. We need regulations to stop people from doing bad things with it. 

And we don’t appear to have those kinds of political systems in place at present. 

SAJID JAVID : Speaking as myself, as a former government minister, as a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, I’m interested to know also how you think this might change existing structures. For example, you have talked about many people losing their jobs as obviously happened in the Industrial Revolution. What that means for society and the types of jobs that might be lost, and that’s what I might call — when I’m talking about the ‘bad’ [ dimensions and effects of AI ] — that … it’s a sort of necessary outcome of technological change. But how profound do you think that will be?

GEOFFREY HINTON : Well, if you want to know what happened in the Industrial Revolution, to ordinary people, I think reading Dickens is good. 

… I think there will be similar amounts of change caused by AI. And my worry is that even though it will cause huge increases in productivity — which should be very good for society — it could be very bad for society if all  the benefit goes to the rich, and a lot of people lose their jobs and become poorer.

If you have a big gap between rich and poor it’s very bad for society. 

SAJID JAVID : What’s different this time? 

GEOFFREY HINTON : So these things are more intelligent than we are.

So there’s never any chance in the Industrial Revolution that machines would take over from people just because they were stronger. We were still in control because we had the intelligence. 

Now, there’s a threat that these things can take control. 

So that’s one big difference.

SAJID JAVID : And I think it’s the pace of change as well — how quickly this is all happening. 

GEOFFREY HINTON : Yes, it’s very, very fast. Much faster than I expected. Because it’s so fast, we haven’t had the time to do the research needed on how to keep it under control.

SAJID JAVID : And let’s just talk about … some of the good things that are already emerging from AI. For example, as a former health secretary I think a lot about the advances that can be made in medical research, in life sciences. Is that a sector you can pick and say that actually is something where you can really extend life years for people? We can all live longer and have happier and healthier lives.

GEOFFREY HINTON : Yes. So I think it’s going to do tremendous good in areas like medicine. And that’s why it’s unrealistic to talk about stopping the progress. 

I didn’t sign the petition that asked for that a few years ago because it just seemed completely unrealistic to me. In health care, for example, we’ll be able to have family doctors who in effect have seen a hundred million patients. And have all the tests that have ever been done on you and on your relatives. 

Two hundred thousand people — about — die everywhere from bad diagnoses. Most of that’s gonna go away. 

Already, an AI system is better than a doctor at doing diagnosis. And the combination of an AI system and the doctor is much better than the doctor at dealing with difficult cases, and the AI system’s only gonna get better.

SAJID JAVID : In the past, you previously predicted — I think you said there was a ten percent chance that AI will lead to human extinction within the next three decades. Has anything changed your analysis of that?  

GEOFFREY HINTON : Erm. Not really. I think, ten to twenty [per cent].

SAJID JAVID : Oh, you’re going up!

GEOFFREY HINTON : If anything. You see, we’ve never had to deal with anything like this before. 

And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing?

There are very few examples. There’s a mother and baby. Evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother. But that’s about the only example I know of.

SAJID JAVID : Perhaps then just to end on — despite what you’ve said — I remain an optimist about AI and what it means. Am I right to feel that way?

GEOFFREY HINTON : I hope you’re right to feel that way. My friend Yann LeCun, who’s also very knowledgeable about AI feels that way. … My worry is that the invisible hand [ capitalism ] is not gonna keep us safe. 

So just leaving it to the profit motive of large companies is not gonna be sufficient to make sure that they develop it safely. 

You can see that if you look at the history of Open AI. Initially, they were very concerned with safety and as time went by and the potential profits got bigger, they’ve got less and less concerned with safety. 

The only thing that can force these big companies to do more research on safety is government regulation. 

Christo preceded Banksy in wresting material security or ‘business models’ from ephemeral, unshackled art — offered to all with no admission fee

. Artists, Artists writers and money, Business models for publishing, Keiretsu-cooperative, writers and money . , , , , , ,

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Christo married nature to the built world with a modernist eye for straightforward surrealism — going beyond the real — in art that often abstracted bits of pattern or contour from a landscape, then displayed his ideas there temporarily by covering up great hunks of it in fabric, or by fastening objects onto it ( See: samples )

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Banksy’s stencilled goat (L) compared to an American Indian cave painter’s freehand rendering of a nanny goat kidding with human aid, a pictograph that could be six thousand years old

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Christo could have no equal in his extravagantly inventive reinvention of payment for art. Applying artistic license to finance, he exercised it to the limit. Heaven only knows how he worked out his methods of getting paid not for his barely-there/short-stay/vanishing/ephemeral works of ‘land art’, seemingly dreamt up at their gargantuan scale by giants — in fact, by a bespectacled figure as slight as an idea still being translated into flesh — but mainly for his creations’ equivalents of amniotic sacs, their eggshell-fragments, their tadpole tails. 

Getting paid, that is, without government arts-and-culture grants or fat cat patrons or by lending his face or images of his creations to purveyors of luxury goods, to flatter their status-seeking buyers by association. If there were artists before him who showed him how to thrive by unconventional means, they go unmentioned in encyclopaedia entries, journalists’ potted biographies, and on Christo fan sites. 

Christo as the signature not noticeable on projects such as Wrapped Coast in 1969 — in which an entire small bay and its cliffs in Australia were draped in grey erosion-control fabric for ten weeks — eventually referred to both the primary mover and his collaborator and wife, two artists born in different countries on the same June day in 1935. 

They were married in the late 1950s in Paris, where he had arrived by way of Vienna and Geneva, having fled Bulgaria, where he was born, as a penniless 21 year-old stowaway on a railway car — to escape military conscription and being forced by the Communist government to paint propagandist imagery. She was a Moroccan-born socialite living there, the stepdaughter of a distinguished French general, when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of her strikingly beautiful mother.

Her family’s wealth was probably the psychological safety net for the Christo partnership’s confident, early rejection of the usual ways of earning money for art to seek alternatives. His contribution was psychological drive — motivation that children of the well-off typically do not find on their own. It originated in dire family travails and his own struggle for free expression in Bulgaria, where his father had been imprisoned ‘for being part of the intelligentsia,’ leaving a household that had been prosperous impoverished and subjected to oppressive state surveillance.

Combining actual names for credits would have hinted at these complex antecedents but made an indigestible nomenclature soup: Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. 

Part of their earnings came from the sale of original lithographs related to their creations; the rest from purchasers of the sketches and collages, preparatory drafts, plans, and scale models of their spectacular finished works — for whose execution they hired other hands, or accepted help from volunteers. They insisted that their contributions to art should be seen as encompassing their exhausting extended battles to overcome public and governmental opposition to realising their imaginings — most famously, a fight for nearly a quarter-century ’across six Bundestag presidents,’ for permission to wrap old imperial Germany’s Reichstag, its supreme government building, still serving in that role today.

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Some of us spent the end of summer waiting for any plausible cultural commentator to invoke Christo as the crucial predecessor — part-inspiration, surely? — of Banksy, the pseudonymous and elusive street artist-cum-prankster from Bristol who cheered everyone up after the mass rioting following Britain’s change of government in July.

The goat mural that attracted worldwide attention in early August was obviously in the stencilling tradition he is so proud of — because it lets him put up murals he has worked on in his studio at top speed. Not so as to shine as a time-and-motion virtuoso, but to avoid getting arrested. He could still work fast and stealthily in a freehand line but, no, he prefers the mechanical look of stencils with none of the élan or genius of the cut-outs Matisse turned out like hotcakes in his old age. These Banksy templates actually look as if they were never drawn at all but traced from documentary photographs, reminding the viewer of his reputation as a copycat’s copycat — since stencilled graffiti have been associated since the early 1980s  with a Parisian artist, Blek le Rat, who has complained mildly about the imitation.

None of this is to deny the charm or wit in Banksy’s antic political protests, from his very first graffito in 1997, a mural with a cartoon teddy bear hurling a Molotov cocktail at hapless riot policemen.

Like Christo, Banksy also earns his money — millions of pounds a year, it is said in unsubstantiated reports — by thumbing his nose at traditional sources of income for art. (He could be an invisible man with no visible means of support except for the unavoidable conclusion from visits to art world sites, that he and mainstream media have an unofficial pact to keep the wheeze about his indeterminable identity going for as long as possible, to give us something to smile about.)  As a street artist determined to avoid being dictated to, exploited or edited by gallery owners, he sells representations or versions of his murals — ‘stencil works, silkscreens, and lithographs rendered in the same style as his wall pieces, and in many cases [using] the same imagery’ — according to a long, absorbing and apparently well-informed account of his ‘business model’ on Art Space’s website. 

He seems never to have sought to stop ‘art dealers and property owners … tearing apart walls to remove and sell Banksy works.’ For a span of years ending in 2018, he collaborated with other graffiti specialists to sell modestly-priced prints of their images through a printshop and website. That collective, Pictures on Walls, was shut down six years ago with this impressive statement:

Inevitably disaster struck—and many of our artists became successful. Street Art was welcomed into mainstream culture with a benign shrug and the art we produced became another tradeable commodity. Despite attempts at price fixing regrettably some POW prints have become worth tens of thousands of pounds. 

Either unable or unwilling to become part of the art market we once so self-righteously denounced — we called it quits.

Banksy apparently continues to circumvent the art world’s mercantile establishment by selling his work exclusively through private arrangements with buyers — again, according to Art Space’s worshipful exegesis.

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Search engines produce few or no results for simple queries combining Christo’s and Banksy’s names — yield no evidence of anyone noticing their similarities. A list of rough jottings:

— art displayed for no charge in public spaces — playfulness/ a spirit of fun even when protesting about collective obtuseness/social injustice

— earn money (lots) from tangentials, incidentals and representations of — not the works themselves 

— art that is not made with permanence as the objective 

— BUT is also part of a personal fight against authority of some kind — for C, with governments or collective administrators; for B, against gallery owners and other ruling powers in art merchandising establishment

—  art that offends some — B’s sometimes referred to as defacements or vandalism; C’s infuriated eg., Parisians who objected to the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, and it took decades to overcome objections to several public projects, even when he and Jeanne-Claude won

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Christo and Banksy matter naturally to this p-G website because financial innovation for a different category of arts worker is the point of the proposal for a keiretsu-cooperative — a constructively social, egalitarian scheme for using the internet to nudge publishing into its post-Gutenberg future.

Alas, no writers appear to have accomplished what these artists have in setting their enviable terms for making art pay, and handsomely. 

This is less true of Christo — who survived Jeanne-Claude by eleven years and died in 2020 — than of Banksy, who does not lend his image or scraps of autobiography to hawking his pictures. What contemporary, real-life equivalent is there of the wholly fictional M. N. Opie, a gifted, principled storyteller in a new novel by Neel Mukherjee, who ‘refuses to jump through the hoops of book promotion, will discuss editorial matters over email but avoids social media and will volunteer no personal information, not even a gender’? The LRB reviewer, Adam Mars-Jones, believes like most professional novelists that they are powerless to oppose being required to appear before the public like plucked chickens: ‘These days self-promotion, the business of presenting to the world your trauma or cheekbones (ideally both) is not optional …’. Brilliant M. N. Opie’s story collection does not find enough readers to save it from imploding into utter obscurity.

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We must reach once again to the past and a certain Elizabethan playwright for an example of a scribbler soaring above the constraints and humiliations bedevilling writers to succeed in a bold new way of earning a living — the subject of a p-G post in March. Jonathan Bate — the Shakespeare expert whose deductions about the Bard’s financial acumen from decades of research featured there, effectively makes a case for Shakey being a sort of Banksy avant la lettre, for his own reasons. 

The dearth of verifiable flesh-and-blood facts about the man from Stratford-on-Avon, Bate suggests, is not in the least accidental. It is what he intended for posterity. Philosophy in Shakespeare’s day was conditioned by the Greeks and Romans. They warned about the double-sidedness of fame; that with glory comes Rumour, ‘the evil of the highest velocity,’ envisaged as a shameless surveillance she-monster whose body is pocked all over with ‘vigilant eyes’. Bate singles out Epicurus as the crucial influence — homing in on ‘the Epicurean precept that would have been the perfect motto for Shakespeare: “HIDE THY LIFE.”’ [ JB’s emphasis ]

That could hardly be an injunction for the rest of us, now. What defence has the resourceful Banksy himself against the ever-intruding snouts of the data collection apps in our devices, the treacherous software in the internet of things; against our collectively spineless, toothless — or uncomprehending — submission to an AI-ruled future? Or does Banksy rely on human couriers networking with carrier pigeons to communicate, and post on Instagram through intermediaries? Questions for a future p-G installment.