HOW DO WE STOP THE BIG ROBOT TAKEOVER?

As AI gets smarter, meet the academics on a mission to save humanity from the matrix

- JOSH GLANCY

ON A dank Friday night in Oxford, an ambassador O from the Vatican addresses a gathering of philosophers. Other than an invocation for audience members to tweet about the event, this might be a scene from the 15th century - the location for the gathering is St Luke's Chapel, its walls crisp and whitewashed, its glass windows stained.

Yet the subject matter under discussion could not be more contemporary: robots and what to do about them. Father Paolo Benanti, the speaker, is the pope's adviser on artificial intelligence. His urgent message to the assembled boffins, fellows of the newly created Institute for Ethics in Al at Oxford University, is that we're in danger of becoming an "algocracy", a society ruled by algorithms.

"We must recognise how order is made, how power is shifted by these new tools, Benanti pleads. "What rights do we want to sacrifice in the name of efficiency?"

These questions posed by Benanti are anything but academic. Much of our life, from what books we buy to what news we consume, is already heavily influenced by algorithms. But the past two years have seen a quantum leap in the quality and sophistication of artificial intelligence. We've entered what many experts are now describing as a golden age of AI.

In recent months OpenAI, one of the leading companies in the field, has twice lit up social media by giving us gorgeous, terrifying glimpses of the future. Over the summer it released DALL-E 2, which takes simple instructions - "show me Henry VIII eating a hot dog" - and generates startlingly good images.

Then in November it released ChatGPT, a chatbot whose ability to give instant, human-seeming responses to a dizzying array of questions left many wondering whether it had just killed off the undergraduate essay. Universities are still scrambling to respond.