On: 'Risk to humanity': At UN, tech leaders urge caution in AI development

I have read that the makers of this thinking machinery stood before the governments of the world and begged to be restrained. There is something almost touching in it, and something that demands the closest inspection of any ledger I have ever been handed.

A merchant who comes to the magistrate crying, “Regulate me, for my wares are dangerous,” is doing one of two things. Either he has discovered that rules, drawn by himself and his competitors, will entrench his position against the newcomer - the established house always finds that a licensing fee weighs less than a rival. Or he is purchasing something cheaper than regulation: the appearance of conscience. Both may be true at once, which is what makes the performance so difficult to read.

Yet I must be fair, and fairness compels me further. The men who make these machines are better placed than any magistrate to know where the defect lies in the mechanism. A manufacturer who warns that his own engine may crush the hands that feed it is at least not concealing the danger. The question is never whether the warning is sincere; it is whether the institution that receives it can act upon it without becoming the prisoner of the warners. When the same trade writes the rules it must live under, I know what the conversation produces. It seldom ends in the public’s favour.

And there is the other matter, which no one at that assembly mentioned. These machines promise a division of labour more minute than any workshop has achieved - and I have seen what such division does to the workman when nobody attends to him. Astonishing output; a mind reduced to tending one lever. The efficiency is real. So is the stupefaction. The merchants spoke of humanity’s survival, which is grand, and said nothing of the clerk whose trade vanishes next quarter, which is near.

Regulate, then - but let the hand that writes the rule not belong to the man selling the machine.