Jill Lepore asks why nobody listened to warnings about the threats posed from the AI revolution (Democracy v the machine, 18 August). As she is a Harvard professor, her piece is understandably US-centric. But in 1972 there was an international gathering of AI researchers and others in Italy to tackle the ethical and social implications of AI.
This “Serbelloni group” of global experts (they met at Villa Serbelloni on Lake Como) was led by my father, Donald Michie, the director of the University of Edinburgh’s department of machine intelligence. The group mapped out early concerns regarding potential political tyranny, the erosion of human autonomy and widespread social coercion driven by automation.
Why did nobody listen? In part because the next year the UK cut research funding for machine learning, robotics and AI, following the Lighthill report, which had been established – it has since been documented – for this purpose. Researchers had instead to focus on more immediately industrial-relevant work. My father’s attempts to reconvene the Serbelloni group to include experts from the humanities thus proved unsuccessful.
Jonathan Michie
Professor of innovation & knowledge exchange, University of Oxford
Jill Lepore rightly traces those welcoming the rampaging AI machine in a free market while modern humanists fear the unchecked machine. She mentions the underestimated American intellectual Lewis Mumford, who devoted most of his life to restraining the uninhibited city as a form of machine damaging people by the million. He hooked up with the British humanist Frederic J Osborn in a letter exchange that lasted over three decades, developing a sane town-planning system.
Mumford was wise enough to see that the automatic machine had the capacity to make man passive and purposeless in the same manner as did living in the city, and humans must resist induced passivity of all kinds. So the myth still prevails. Beware – AI is really not that smart, and a few well-chosen puzzles for it to solve expose its crippling obsession with data, not with the humans’ forte, knowledge.
Callum Brown
Professor emeritus in history, University of Glasgow
