Frank Cottrell-Boyce: AI is a mirror – but will we like what we see?

What world will our children inherit? Will it be one in which the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs are done by robots while humans sit around painting and writing poetry in a utopia of leisure? Or will it be the other way round: robots sitting around playing chess and making art while our children scrub the toilets?

The great scientist James Lovelock predicted that one day AI would run the world but would keep humans as pets. Not all humans, of course, just a selection of the more interesting ones.

One of the first people to invest in AI described it as an existential threat to humanity. Developing it, he said, would be like summoning a demon. As I write this, that man – his name is Elon Musk – is trying to buy OpenAI, the American AI research organisation. Maybe the demon won.

Except AI isn’t a demon. It’s a thing of codes and wires made by humans, and Musk is doing something humans have done ever since fire. We discover and invent things, then talk about them as if they had lives of their own. It can be useful. My dad talked to his rusty car. He even gave it a name. Treating it like a fellow creature helped him pay attention to its groans and rattles.

The problem starts when we let our inventions bully us. When we invent a river god then sacrifice our children to it. The Victorians had a near-religious faith in the markets. The markets demanded that children work themselves to death in the cotton mills. Be careful what you anthropomorphise.

When a new technology comes along, we get excited by the novelty but it can take time to understand its implications. Children had always worked, but they’d worked alongside their parents – often in the open air, learning crafts. It may have been back-breaking but it was also human. That’s not the same as running in and out of a relentless, deafening steam loom in a dark satanic mill. Eventually the great reformers saw that some kind of regulation was needed. Surely this is where we’re at with our children and AI.

When we complain that they’re addicted to their screens, they are helping to train AI. It’s harvesting their tastes, habits, wordplay. They’re helping to build… what? Possibly the most wonderful tool. Something that could help us solve the climate crisis, waste less, personalise medicine, give us early diagnoses, tailor treatment and monitor progress. Or possibly be the plaything of a few unpredictable unhappy oligarchs who could warp their whole view of reality.

We need to decide. We need to remember that when we look at AI we’re not looking at a demon, we’re looking in a mirror. AI is possibly the future but it is certainly built from our past. The only evidence we have for the possibility of AI is, after all, our own human brains.

But there is something AI misses. Those D jobs – the dull, dirty, drudgery – that it promises to take away, may also contain the best of us, when we do them for each other. Maybe it’s in this, the quiet graft of love, that we find what is truly special about us.

The most beautiful love poem I know is one that Seamus Heaney wrote about his mother. It describes them silently peeling spuds together. He remembers "her head bent towards my head/Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives". This patient, devoted work brings us together while screens promote isolation. So if you want to protect the future from the demon, peel the spuds with your children.

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