I will be the last person on the face of this planet to even dare to attempt to lecture anyone on the benefits, opportunities, challenges and threats which are being unleashed by generative artificial intelligence.
But I will be among the first to chastise the leaders of my country for sleepwalking Malta into irrelevance.
Where are our leaders? And I am not referring only to the person and persons leading the government.
The dearth in leadership in its widest possible sense being experienced by this country of ours cannot be clearer on this epoch-changing development.
Not a single day passes, since last November, when the major international news organisations, including the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the like, did not have AI headlined.
Countries, big and small, both within the European Union and far away, are racing and competing with each other to have the best AI strategy in place in order to attract the biggest AI investment and to reap the booming opportunities.
The UK prime minister wants his country to be “a science and technology superpower” by 2030.
But The Economist cautioned about the public datasets in the UK: “They are in no fit state for AI developers to exploit – the data are unrefined ore, not sparkling treasure… A stock of clean, regularly updated datasets that are technically and legally easy for algorithm-makers to use would draw in engineers who want to build new AI systems.”
What is the state of the public datasets in Malta? Best left unanswered as the answer will be too hot to handle.
AI developers need massive amounts of compute to train and run large models. Should/can Malta attract GPU (graphics processing units) clusters?
Amazon spends around $25 billion a year on compute. We definitely cannot keep up with the private sector – and should not try. Should the government do all it can to persuade commercial providers to invest in GPU clusters on Maltese soil?
It is a given that AI could be used to influence elections, manipulate financial markets and allow criminals to create ‘counterfeit people’. Recent instances of AI overruling nurses in oncology wards in US hospitals have sparked concern. Who should make the call in a health crisis, the human or the machine/algorithm?
More than 350 of the world’s most distinguished experts in AI last month warned of the possibility that the technology could lead to the extinction of humanity. They said that mitigating this risk “should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”.
Many people worry that they will end up on the economic scrapheap. Global Google searches for “is my job safe?” have doubled in recent months. Reports of physicians starting to use Chatbots to improve their bedside manners have caused concern in medical circles abroad.
Is it too much to call upon parliament to set up a digital committee to start a national discussion on the mind-blowing advancement of AI?- Jason Azzopardi
One of the leading innovators of artificial intelligence is among those currently offering dire warnings about the dangers of the technology. He has argued that AI could soon be more intelligent than the people who created it and that the impact on the labour market could be significant.
Even developers and senior managers at Microsoft and Google have admitted they no longer know exactly how applications with AI work.
In nearby Cyprus, Cyprus Airways and FLYR Labs have announced a strategic agreement to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for end-to-end revenue optimisation and forecasting. Cyprus Airways will be able to dynamically optimise revenue 24/7.
In 2021, the Slovenian government adopted its national AI programme to establish efficient support to research and deployment of artificial intelligence by enhanced networking of relevant stakeholders, to respond to socio-economic changes such as changes in the labour market and education system, to provide an appropriate ethical and legal framework and to increase trust of the citizens in artificial intelligence.
Last month, the German Bundestag had a public hearing to discuss the significant technological developments and new technologies with a potentially disruptive character, such as generative AI, from a data protection perspective.
As the Financial Times series of AI stated recently: “There are, of course, risks with the latest AI. A recent technical paper on GPT4 acknowledges the systems can ‘amplify biases and perpetuate stereotypes’. They can ‘hallucinate’. They can also be plain wrong and raise the spectre of technological unemployment. Hence, the frenzy of ethical and regulatory debate…The professions are unprepared. Many companies are still focused on selling the time of their people,and their growth strategies are premised on building larger armies of traditional lawyers, auditors, tax advisers, architects and the rest.”
While Malta is taken up with the shenanigans of am absurd pastor, Google’s chief executive has said concerns about artificial intelligence keep him awake at night and that the technology can be “very harmful” if deployed wrongly.
Is it too much to call upon parliament to set up a digital committee to start a national discussion with all stakeholders on the mind-blowing advancement of AI and its impact, good or bad, in our lifetime?
Our leaders’ silence is screaming at us in the face.
Jason Azzopardi is a former Nationalist Party MP.