Big tech breakthroughs always come with big promises

Having come into the world at a time of zero plastic and no technology greater than a valve radio I have witnessed remarkable changes in how we live. With every advance in technology the pundits have claimed how this or that will make life better – from the free energy we were going to get from nuclear power to the life of endless leisure brought about by automation. While lives may have been made more comfortable for many, it would seem utopia is a long way off.

Today we have the worst gap between rich and poor, and I cannot believe that if AI takes over all work then we will all benefit. The rich minority will just get richer, and the poor majority will struggle to survive. We have no evidence that the predicted wealth will trickle down to those who don’t control that wealth. Indeed, the opposite is usually the case.

Can you imagine a future Tory government, if such there ever is, handing over large payments to those who aren’t working but don’t have any inherent wealth? Sorry to disappoint you.

G Forward

Stirling

It is to be hoped the King’s Speech will seriously address the many challenges facing the UK.

First and foremost of these has to be governance. The appalling revelations at the Covid inquiry this week about events at No 10 during the pandemic point to the need for a complete overhaul of our political system.

No longer should the country be, in a time of crisis, at the mercy of a disorganised PM and his overmighty spad. Our first-class, permanent civil servants need to be allowed to do their work without interference or abuse from “comers in”.

Then there is the flatlining British economy. Here the need is for the stakeholder ideas so ably articulated by Will Hutton – for example, a 21st Century Companies Act along with reformed finance.

Given the somewhat unimaginative, and seemingly desperate, administration we currently have in place, it is probably too much to hope for anything of this to come about any time soon. However, if our country is to have any real hope of revival these will have to be the building blocks.

Andrew McLuskey

Address supplied

I’m amused that the “great and good” are discussing AI and its risks as if this is something really new that no one has thought of before.

Science fiction writers were writing about AI benefits and risks back in the 1950s, some even earlier, and long before computers were even remotely capable of being considered “intelligent”.

I remember reading, as a child in the 1960s, a short story about a scientist who had built the “ultimate” intelligent computer, and which he then asked, “Does God exist?” The computer, having thought about it for a short while, and checking that its power supply was under its own direct control and thus could not be disconnected, replied in a booming sepulchral voice: “He does now!”

Ian McNicholas

Ebbw Vale

I read with interest and excitement about the AI “genie” which will make all work obsolete! Being inherently lazy and loving pottering about in the garden and indulging in my lockdown hobby of lino-printing, I can imagine the entire population becoming happy craftsmen, artists and nature ramblers.

However, I wonder if AI will clean the loo, care for the elderly, fix the plumbing, feed the family, look after the kids, put up shelves, mend the roof or change the nappies? Or is manual work well beyond Mr Musk’s vivid imagination?

Eleanor Holloway

Ascot