Welcome to the AI Futures Forum! This is somewhere you can both learn about the broader impact of AI, and join the conversation about the technology and its impact on all of us.

I started to map the AI landscape in its entirety in late 2022, soon after the hype around ChatGPT hit the headlines. It has been full immersion: learning daily from a broad cross-section of experts and commentators to absorb as many views points as possible.

My objective was to scrutinise the complex matrix of interrelated features across the landscape – not just the technical, but also the societal, political, economic, legal and philosophic features – and then piece everything back together to understand the whole. Rather like if you want to understand how a car engine works, take it apart to appreciate the whole. This won’t necessarily qualify you as a mechanic but you will have certainly become a better-informed generalist.

Given the pressing need to get AI ‘right first time’ and the vital importance of both domestic and international governments to strike the right balance between enabling progress and discouraging bad actors, I have derived both observations and recommendations for government policy and communications from this analysis.

I should add that on the attitude-to-AI scale that spans from ‘doomer’ to ‘accelerationist’ I place myself closer to the latter rather than the former, describing myself as an ‘optimist/incrementalist’ (if there’s such a defined position). To elaborate: I recognise AI as generally a force for good but accept that racing headlong into the future without any caution could be a mistake.

Finally, I think it is important to distinguish between ‘intelligence’ as developed in the AI labs across the world, and the implementation of AI advances in the wider world. Many seem to conflate the two which can lead to differing opinions on the rate of progress. It is clear that huge strides are being made in the quest for AGI and ASI*, and embodying these technologies holds particular promise, but it will take time for these advances to find their way into everyday life. That’s not to say that AI technologies are yet to arrive – less-sophisticated AI has been around for a long time – but the hype of the last 20 months has raised people’s expectations too high. Inevitably this has made many sceptical, but I’m certain that a new paradigm is happening and we need to be as prepared as possible.

James Tuke

*Conceding that we’ve yet to agree on the exact definition of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI)