AI powering 'Fourth Industrial Revolution', by Nick Freer

In a recent Bloomberg interview with Bill Gates, when quizzed about artificial intelligence (AI) the Microsoft founder said he thinks we’re seeing a “fundamental advance as important as any in the history of digital technology”.

Tech giants like Microsoft are investing tens of billions of dollars into AI, not only backend capacity but also to reengineer their applications so they are more productive.

On the subject of AI chipmaker Nvidia becoming the world’s most valuable company earlier this year, Gates was asked if he worried that we’re seeing bubble valuations around AI stocks.  “Multiples aren’t as high as during the internet bubble and the growth is real”, said Gates, “I mean, AI is not Pets dot com”.

This week, Nvidia’s stock rose by more than 2 per cent after an industry report projected “unprecedented” levels of investment in artificial intelligence and related technology infrastructure to stay on top of the AI boom.

AI has an insatiable need for electricity and it is draining power grids worldwide.  For Gates, this presents an obvious conundrum.  In 2015, he founded Breakthrough Energy, a venture capital firm set up to invest in emerging climate technologies.

Taking a quick look at artificial intelligence stories across the news this week, we can see its phenomenal scope - from detecting new archaeological sites in the desert, to actors John Cena and Judi Dench providing voicing for Meta’s chatbot.  Unquestionably, AI is now all-pervading, and it is no surprise that many commentators describe it as being the main driver of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.

The idea of algorithms pretending to be humans and distorting information systems is one of the concepts considered by author Yuval Noah Harari in ‘Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI’, published earlier this month.

Harari uses the example of going onto Twitter/X, where you see a story with a lot of traffic and traction, and the natural assumption is that a lot of humans are interested in it.  Many of these stories, asserts Harari, are actually generated by bots and algorithms.  As he puts it, “we shouldn’t have a situation where algorithms that pretend to be humans are running our conversations”.

Nexus outlines how the corporate algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and others deliberately spread fiction, hate, fear, and greed because this is good for their business interests.  Further still, this is what they should be liable for, namely the decisions and actions of their algorithms, as opposed to what human users are doing on their platforms.

Comparing organic information (human) versus inorganic information (algorithms), Nexus gets to the root of one of our great modern dilemmas: human beings work in cycles, sometimes we work, sometimes we need sleep, but algorithms are tireless.  “What see in the world now”, says Harari, “is that algorithms increasingly make us work at their pace, there is never any time to rest - the news cycle, markets, politics, they are always on”.

Harari frequently returns to paradoxes: for instance, we have named ourselves Homo sapiens, meaning the wise human - but if we are so wise, why are we doing so many self-destructive things?

Right, I’m off to unplug our Alexa, at least for the weekend.