The year was 1987, and I was working in a magazine office in Marylebone where people communicated either by telephone or by shouting. One day, there was a commotion by the front door as two stout delivery men dressed in what seemed like identical disposable coveralls squeezed through the door carrying an enormous cardboard box. When they opened it, what was left on the floor was a gigantic machine that looked like a badly designed fridge.
It was a fax machine, the first one any of us had ever seen. Obviously, its arrival necessitated much fevered experimentation. One staff member greedily pushed a piece of A4 paper into it, but then suddenly looked confused.
“It’s still here,” she said, momentarily discombobulated by the fact her letter was still in the tray.
“It’s not matter transfer,” mumbled my friend Rod, rushing by to pick up his phone. Indeed, it wasn’t.
A film producer showed me rushes of a film made by AI — it was as good as any Marvel
Technology always seems to arrive when we least expect it, but then just moments later we can’t seem to live without it, whatever form it comes in. I felt a bit like my fax feeder friend a few weeks ago, when I sat next to an American film producer at dinner. He told me he was midway through shooting some kind of superhero movie and showed me some rushes on his phone. It was incredibly sophisticated whizz-bang stuff and looked very slick, like watching an extremely expensive video game. As I started to say something complimentary, he blurted out his much-rehearsed punchline: “And it’s all done with AI.” Wow, really? It looked properly amazing, and when I asked him what source material it came from, naively asking him how he had actually made it, he dropped his second bomb of the evening: “It’s all text-generated.”
What he was showing me was as good as anything I’d ever seen by Marvel, and yet it had all been created by punching a few sentences into a sappy old laptop. Not only was what he showed me ridiculously accomplished, but my new friend said that when he got back to LA in a few days’ time, having been away for a month, his team would have produced something that would look about 20 per cent better.
Not only was I blown away by this, I felt rather stupid, as though someone had just landed on Mars and I had somehow missed it. What I saw was the future, and as well as being fantastically impressed, I was petrified. Because AI has become one of those things that we pretend we understand, but actually don’t at all. Don’t believe me? Trust me, at some point this week I guarantee you’ll be having a meeting about AI. No doubt about it. If you don’t believe me, have a quick look at the calendar on your phone and you’ll see that at 10.30 on Thursday morning, someone’s coming in to see you about an AI cloud computing service provider.
Either that, or virtual assistance, a new e-commerce platform, some kind of AI fraud detection, an autonomous vehicle, a cheeky little chatbot, something or other that does image recognition or a state-of-the-art healthcare system. You will have no idea how it got in your diary, but having AI as a prefix is these days the most effective way of getting into anyone’s diary. It obviates the need for explanation and is the easiest way to circumvent your assistant (should you be lucky enough to have one). As soon as he read “AI” in the email, he would have accelerated the meeting. Because you can’t not have a meeting about AI. Like having dot-com attached to your brand name back in the day, AI is today’s prefix of choice.
It’s not the existential fear that ensnares us — the flurry of panic around automation and the threat of being replaced — it’s the fear of being left behind, of not knowing what peers are talking about. The fear of looking out of date. Face it: we’re not worried by the thought of AI machines running amok, ruining the political system or causing global disruption. We’re worried about looking out of date.
