The 9 are abroad… or, how I learned to stop worrying and love AI

***The 9 are abroad… or, how I learned to stop worrying and love AI, by Daniel Dresner, Professor of Cyber Security at the University of Manchester*** ***Abstract*** Humanity’s attitude to new technology can be measured on a scale that varies from – in the words of A. P. Herbert – ‘Let’s find out what everyone is doing, and then stop everyone from doing it.’, to Arthur Dent’s question: ‘What happens if I press this button?... What we frequently fail to grasp firmly, is that Ecclesiastes’ observation – ‘that there is nothing new under the sun’ still holds true. Technology is usually just a matter of speed, or as Sir Terry Pratchett observed, ‘progress is just bad things happing faster’. And nowhere can we find a technology that (over) promises more comparative adjectives than a pomegranate is full of pips (Adams again) than AI…or ‘alleged intelligence’ as I prefer to think of it. AI has emerged in the way we find it today because like that scene in the Carpenter remake of The Thing, the head was separated from the body, and has tried to grow its own legs. It was bound to be a horror story. However, if we take a moment to anchor our approach to sorting out the AI security challenges in the philosophy of The Preacher, then there’s hope. In this presentation, I shall suggest nine principles with which we may just manage to reattach the AI head to the body of cybernetics that it left 70 years ago…