In the original Terminator film, Skynet, an AI controlled defensive system, became self-aware at 2:14am EDT, on 29 August 1997. And that led to the frightening scenario in the film and all its sequels. I’m not really suggesting that we are all doomed. You know as well as I do that headlines are only there to grab your attention. What I am suggesting is that these emerging technologies (and like all emerging technologies, they’ve been around for a while) will make huge changes to our lives.
Let’s look back at personal computing. Many people can remember the clunky IBM PCs available in the early 1980s. You typed into them and remembered to save your work (usually). Nowadays, using Word or Google Docs, you type in, and it tells you if it thinks you have misspelled a word. It also suggests that your grammar may be wrong – you have used the wrong form of the verb to go with the subject of your sentence, The software has, in many ways, deskilled the job of writing. You no longer have rooms full of typists at companies. Most people no longer need a secretary to write their letters. It also means that teachers marking essays, shouldn’t be spending their time correcting grammar errors in their students’ work because the software should have done it already before the work was submitted. Teachers will be marking the content of the essay, the information it contains, and the application of the facts and the ideas.
In a similar way, when things like ChatGPT, Bard from Google, and Copilot from Microsoft, become commonly available, they will have a huge impact on the essays written by students. It will be possible to tell the AI what you want written and how many words, and the AI will write the essay. To begin with, these will need to be checked to ensure that the facts are all true (they aren’t always!), but that will only be half the story. The teacher marking the essay, will, probably, have already received 30 very similar essays from the other students in the class. What will be needed is for the students to show how those fact can be applied, and their own ideas. The simple regurgitation of facts won’t be enough. People will still write essays, but the important content will be different. I’m suggesting that things will have to change. And, slowly they will.
ChatGPT and the others are examples of Large Language Models (LLMs). These are AIs that can generate natural language texts from large amounts of data. Their responses make it seem like you are conversing with an intelligent piece of software. However, in many ways, they are simply choosing the most likely word to come next in a conversation or essay or poem, etc.
So, AIs could produce contracts for the merger of two companies. Both sides will use their own Ai to create very similar contracts. And those companies will use AIs to ensure that the contracts protect their investments. And, to begin with, qualified and experienced staff will need to double-check those contracts. What won’t be needed are the staff that usually write those contracts in the first place.
AI could write programs in whatever language you choose. And another AI could test whether that new program works with the existing applications on, for example a mainframe, without causing any problems. But, to begin with, expert programmers and experienced systems programmers will need to cast an eye over the code for any issues or anything that is missing. This is how the AI will learn.
The biggest issue, for some people, with AI is when the software creates artwork, for example a sonnet, a painting, or a work of fiction. Is the book, poem, or picture really art? Does that mean our definitions are going to have to change?
At the more practical level, AI could be used to perform a ransomware attack on your mainframe. It could also carry out the best pen test you’ve ever had on your system, and guide you through the steps you need to take to be as secure as possible. Again, this could lead to a dystopian future (like Terminator) because the figure often quoted is that 20 percent of cyberattacks come from disgruntled employees. Get rid of all employees and cut your risk of attack by a fifth!
All of that can take place on our existing computing platforms. What if you add quantum computing into the mix?
Quantum computers use chips that are housed in cooling units just above absolute zero (0oK), where electrons can move through the superconductors with no resistance. They use qubits, which can simultaneously be a 1 or a 0. IBM says that a qubit places the quantum information it holds into a state of superposition, which represents a combination of all possible configurations of the qubit. Groups of qubits in superposition can create complex, multidimensional computational spaces. Complex problems can be represented in new ways in these spaces. In contrast, all current computing platforms use 0s and 1s to perform addition quite quickly. The bottom line is that quantum computers are hugely faster than conventional computers.
The one negative use of quantum computing that everyone is talking about is their ability to quickly decrypt encrypted data. What people conventionally think would take decades to decrypt, could be decrypted on a quantum machine in hours. That would make online banking a very risky business for everyone. It means that encrypted messages sent over the Internet could be read. It makes the world a very unsafe place. IBM recently took steps to make their mainframes quantum-safe – as far as possible.
On the more positive side, putting AI and quantum computing together would be brilliant for our health. It would be able to identify that we are taking more pain killer medication than usual and identify, from other sources, what our condition might be, and recommend which medical specialist to see for further tests.
It could control traffic flows on busy roads and in towns and cities. It could check planning applications meet local bylaws. So many mundane tasks, could be performed incredibly speedily by AI on quantum computers, and simply checked by qualified humans, that there would never be any need to wait for months for anything to happen again.
Moving forward further, it would become possible for AI running on quantum computers to control robotic equipment to perform very delicate operations on humans – like heart surgery. And, because it never gets tired, these could run 24 hours a day. No-one needs to wait for an operation.
As always, the future is uncertain, but there are many huge benefits of combining AI and quantum computing. But there will be misuse of the technology that needs to be confronted and controlled. I don’t believe Skynet will be become self-aware. I do believe that there will be huge changes in the way our children or grandchildren live their lives from the way we do currently.
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