AI won't ever understand that you can't let it take the man's wheels, son...

...or maybe it will?

I read a fascinating report recently of a debate at the Oxford Union in which some pretty serious artificial intelligence was tasked with debating for and against the concept of AI. Or more specifically, the motion "This house believes that AI will never be ethical."

The AI arguing with itself for the purposes of the debate was the brilliantly named Megatron LLB Transformer, developed by the Applied Deep Research team at Nvidia and based on earlier work by Google. Megatron LLB Transformer ... honestly, it's like the task of naming was offloaded to a group of Year 5 schoolboys. Anyway, arguing for the motion, Megatron stated, "AI will never be ethical. It is a tool and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as 'good' AI and 'bad' humans." It went on to argue that humans were not "smart enough" to make AI ethical or moral. "In the end I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI," it said.

Wise words, right? Because however smart we think we are, we should know from Socrates that we know nothing.

Of course, Megatron was also arguing against the motion, in which guise it offered up some admittedly more alarming pearls of wisdom, starting with "The best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity" and adding that "If you do not have a vision of your organisation's AI strategy, then you are not prepared for the next wave of technological disruption." Blimey.

Chillingly (because it's already true), the AI went on to state "The ability to provide information, rather than the ability to provide goods and services, will be the defining feature of the economy of the 21st Century ... we will be able to see everything about a person, everywhere they go, it will be stored and used in ways that we cannot even imagine." So Orwell was right about Big Brother, he just didn't know it would be AI.

If you're around my age, which I guess most of you are, you might think of Skynet and Cyberdyne Systems when you think of AI, and we all have James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger to thank for that. That's as much of an excuse as I need, really, to feature this little clip from Terminator 2, a 30-yr old film that stands up brilliantly and remains an action-movie benchmark, and an object lesson in how to do a sequel. This is a film I can quote backwards, having used it as a demo video in my TV and hi-fi selling days, but more than that it's a film I love. Pay particular attention to the sound here, the swoosh of the T-800's arm as it reaches out to relieve the barman of his shotgun, the click as it takes his sunglasses... these sounds are unnaturally high in the mix and almost ahead of the movement, to trick us, the viewers, into thinking the Terminator is moving faster than Arnie really can. It's the little details, you see ... and kudos to the unsung heroes of sound design.

And here's the full version of Bad to the Bone by George Thorogood and the Destroyers - not my usual cup of tea, really, and it goes on way too long, but I have a soft spot for it (in small doses) because I associate it with T2.