Editorial: Shining a light onto the unknown

Back in 1865, there was considerable fear about the impact of automobiles in Britain. To protect the public – not to mention vested interests like railways – the Locomotive Act laid down that any self-propelled vehicle on the road had to have a man walking in front of it waving a red flag.

Until a few years ago, there was an analogy between this short-lived Act and the approach towards artificial intelligence.

We knew we were unleashing new technology that would change the world, but we also knew we had scant understanding of how we could adapt its power to our advantage. We struggled with its implications, and with the way malicious forces could leverage this new tool. We asked whether AI had to power to learn so much over time that it could became smarter than the humans that created it.

Teachers struggled with identifying whether content was generated with the help of AI, those same teachers that had long accepted the ability to look things up in a printed encyclopaedia decades ago, or internet in the past few.

Employees struggled with the fear of losing their jobs, even while they were fighting for remote working and job mobility.

Financial services companies struggled with the concept of putting so much data in the Cloud.

We tried to put a man with red flag in front of the problem. But, if we can mix metaphors, the genie is out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back, even assuming that some may still want to do so, just as railroad barons wanted to stop the development of the car.

In the midst of this fear, there was not enough debate about how to control the massive beast we had unleashed in our midst. The solution is education: the more people know and understand AI, the less fear there is; and the more it can be controlled and used in ways that will benefit us all.

This is why it is so important to embrace AI in the educational system. The government announced recently that AI is to be taught to Year 6 students as part of Malta’s digital education strategy. This is welome news.

Rather than focusing on ways to prevent its use, the approach will be to teach these students how to use AI for everything from image creation to text-to-speech and online searching.

This is only one important part of the strategy: the power of the internet and social media has also created a new millennium monster that cannot be underestimated: misinformation and disinformation.

We need to explain to people the need to question what they see and hear, to know the difference between credible sources and those manipulating ideas; we need to understand what is completely real and what is only based on reality; and we need to get our children to understand their place in the real world so that they can balance it against what they perceive from social media. This is why the plan to work with Year 4 students to understand these concepts is so important.

They will learn how to browse safely, create secure passwords and identify fake news.

The strategy will also consider the role of guardians and parents and will tackle the wider concept of digital literacy.

AI is not without its dangers any more than road vehicles are. We have allowed road vehicles to take over public space, pollute our atmosphere and negatively impact our mobility.

Will we allow AI to become so strong that we have to live with its unintended consequences?

The only way to counter this is education.