It turns out that Boris Johnson’s top strategist has more than just Brexit on his mind.

In blog posts published over the past few years, Dominic Cummings takes on some of the major discussions in artificial intelligence — including the question of whether robots could at some point surpass human intelligence and turn us into their pets.

In such an AI-dominated future, swarms of autonomous killer robots could ravage the world while “lookalikes” of actress Milla Jovovich, who played a zombie killer in the “Resident Evil" series, try to break into AI research centers, according to scenarios that Cummings sketches out in blog entries.

“I obviously cannot judge competing expert views” on whether such predictions will become true and if AI systems will, indeed, turn evil at some point, he writes. But examples and researchers he quotes suggest that the 48-year-old, who became known after a film fictionalized his key role in the 2016 Brexit campaign, is deeply worried about what will happen once so-called artificial general intelligence, which has surpassed and combined human-level intelligence in a broad array of areas, becomes a reality.

His writing also provides clues for how Cummings plans to make sure the United Kingdom — long considered Europe’s front-runner in developing AI applications — remains on top of the field once the country leaves the EU.

The U.K. should boost spending on AI, Cummings believes. And the country should get better at making tech giants pay taxes.

1. Becoming America's or China's “AI colony”

If the U.K. fails to keep pace in a global race for AI supremacy, it might end up as in “a sort of colony status” for U.S. and Chinese tech giants, Cummings warns.

Previous British governments have done more harm than good in this regard, he says, citing the example of the 2014 acquisition of London-based AI research company DeepMind, which he says was sold to U.S. tech giant Google “for trivial money without the powers-that-be in Whitehall understanding its significance.”

The solution? Definitely not the European way, he says. Cummings despises the EU’s plan to beat other world regions by becoming a world leader in “trustworthy AI,” arguing that while Brussels is busy “publishing documents about ‘AI and trust’” and “imposing bad regulation like the GDPR,” Europe’s privacy rulebook, the Continent “has totally failed to generate anything approaching what is happening in coastal America and China” in terms of AI.

Instead, the U.K. should boost spending on AI, he believes. And the country should get better at making tech giants pay taxes.

“If countries cannot tax those companies that lead in AI, they will have narrower options. They may even be forced into a sort of colony status,” he writes. “Those who think this is an exaggeration should look at China’s recent deals in Africa where countries are handing over vast amounts of data to China on extremely unfavourable terms.”

2. AI-powered weapons of mass destruction falling in the hands of malicious actors

Artificial intelligence technology, which allows machines to do jobs that previously required human thinking and is set to revolutionize industries across sectors, has vast potential to do good, from better treating cancer patients to managing environmental disasters caused by climate change.

But Cummings shows little interest in that. Instead he focuses on how AI will transform the way countries lead war and what impact AI will have on the global balance of military powers.

“It is possible that China will build organisations to deploy AI to war/pseudo-war/hybrid-war faster and better than America,” he believes, calling it “plausible that China could find a way within 15 years to find some nonlinear asymmetries that provide an edge while … it outthinks the Pentagon in management and operations.”

At the same time, he is concerned that AI-powered technology will be used to make weapons of mass destruction ever more powerful — and worries what would happen if the technology fell into the hands of malicious actors. Since “coke, great unconventional hookers and a bit of imagination get you into nuclear facilities, just as they get you into pretty much anywhere,” it would need little more than “a Milla Jovovich lookalike” as well as “some alpha engineers,” for that to happen, he believes.

“Given someone can hack the NSA without their identity being revealed, why would they not be hacking Renaissance and Deep Mind, with a bit of help from a Milla Jovovich lookalike who’s reading a book on n-dimensional string theory at the bar when that exhausted physics Ph.D. with the access codes staggers in to relax?” he asks.

The key challenge for policymakers is to make sure that AI systems continue to be aligned with humanity’s interests, even if they once become smarter than we are, Cummings says.

Cummings, who was trained as a historian, is particularly interested in how throughout history, large-scale projects that led to cutting-edge innovation — such as the U.S.-led Manhattan Project that produced the first nuclear weapons, the U.S. Apollo spaceflight program or the Pentagon's ongoing "Project Maven" to apply AI to warfare — were managed and what lessons can be drawn for governments today.

“What seems to be very esoteric and disconnected from ‘practical politics’ (studying things like the management of the Manhattan Project and Apollo) turns out to be extraordinarily practical (gives you models for creating super-productive processes),” he writes.

3. Clueless politicians vs. the robocalypse

Does Cummings expect the robots to take over at some point?

No one knows the answer to that and the option shouldn’t be ruled out, he argues. But he is convinced that they will become ever-more intelligent, and that this will happen faster than widely expected, arguing that if AI systems “shortly beat the best humans at full versions of [complex computer strategy games,] then it means they can outperform at least parts of human reasoning in ways that have been assumed to be many years away.”

Cummings says that, as a layman to computer science, he would be the wrong person to make a definite call there. But thinkers he quotes have warned that AI will at some point outsmart humans in one way or another; they include computer scientist Steve Omohundro, who argues that autonomous systems are likely to behave in anti-social ways; DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg, who expects that “human extinction will probably occur;" or Turing award winner Judea Pearl, whom Cummings quotes by saying that “we’re going to have robots with free will, absolutely.”

Just like work on genetic engineering is subject to certain transparency requirements, work on AI should be suspect to great scrutiny, Cummings argues.

That could have devastating consequences, Cummings believes: “Further, unlike the nuclear race, an [artificial general intelligence] race carries implications of not just ‘destroy global civilisation and most people’ but ‘potentially destroys ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING not just on earth but, given time and the speed of light, everywhere’.”

The key challenge for policymakers is to make sure that AI systems continue to be aligned with humanity’s interests, even if they once become smarter than we are, he says.

Just like work on genetic engineering is subject to certain transparency requirements, work on AI should be suspect to great scrutiny, he argues. And “a weird alliance” that would together technology experts with “political ‘renegades’” is needed, as well as “a new institution with global reach that can win global trust and support,” he believes, adding that “the U.N. is worse than useless for these purposes.”

And what if the robocalypse does come to pass? The world's political leaders, unable to understand the technology, will be struggling to deal with that situation, he is worried.

"Political people and governments are slow to cope with major technological disruptions," he writes, referring to the invention of television 70 years ago: "It’s been dominating politics since the 1950s [but] many politicians still do not understand it well."

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