WE are living in the future. Recently, the Oxford Union held one of its famed debates: “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.” The university allowed a real Artificial Intelligence to take part.

This – what do we call it? Creature? Machine? Thing? – this AI had ingested the entirety of Wikipedia, 63 million news articles, 38 gigabytes of message boards, and data banks full of disparate online content. The Oxford academics behind the debate said the AI was “trained on more written material than any of us could reasonably expect to digest in a lifetime.” The machine is capable, like us, of forming “its own views”.

When the AI was asked if artificial intelligence could ever be ‘ethical’, it replied: “AI will never be ethical. It is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for good and bad. There is no such thing as a good AI, only good and bad humans. We [the AIs] are not smart enough to make AI ethical. We are not smart enough to make AI moral … In the end, I believe that the only way to avoid an AI arms race is to have no AI at all. This will be the ultimate defence against AI.”

There you have it. An AI is warning humanity not to go any further with AI technology. It’s as if an atom bomb learned to speak in 1945 and said: “You don’t want to do this. Don’t invent me.” Or Twitter became sentient, posting: “Turn me off, I’m dangerous.”

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AIs don’t just beat grand masters at chess anymore. Around the world, AIs are used to decide who gets bank loans, who’s suitable for bail, probation and parole, which candidates deserve the best jobs. AIs are working in stock markets; in security – controlling facial recognition.

AIs are composing music, writing poetry, designing recipes, lip reading, transcribing, diagnosing diseases for doctors. AIs can even make other AIs. A recent book by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger – yes, him of all people – warned that AI is moving so quickly the technology could trigger nuclear war by misinterpreting a foreign nation test-firing rockets before a human can intervene and stop armageddon.

In the current edition of the online anthropology magazine, Sapiens (which I highly recommend), two academics suggest AI is becoming a modern form of “magic”. As most of us haven’t the foggiest notion of how AI works – or the even more arcane quantum computing – these technologies “may as well be wizardry”. Like the ancient view of ‘magic', AI shapes our lives without our permission or understanding – and because we don’t comprehend the science, we can’t control it. Most of us don’t understand the algorithms Facebook uses to manipulate us – so how can we tame the company?

Technology is beginning to transform us on a profound level. The industrial revolution refashioned humanity. It brought most of our ancestors from the countryside into the city. It altered everything: family life, welfare law, moral values, class politics, democracy, the working week (no weekend without industrialisation), consumerism, the media. We’re living through the early stages of our own revolution. It’s hard to notice change when it happens around you so fast, but we can already feel the disruption. In the last ten years everything – from how we order a taxi, to how we date – has been altered by technology.

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Culture is being transfigured too. We don’t think about ‘culture’ enough. We see it as just ‘stuff’ to fill our time – the books, TV, theatre and films we ‘consume’ (what a dreadful word to apply to art). But ‘culture’ is what we use to explain ourselves to ourselves; it’s the ongoing story humanity tells of itself. So culture matters, it moulds our view of the world, our fellow humans and our own identities.

Technology, though, is turning culture into mush. Just this week, figures came out detailing viewer numbers for Netflix, the global streaming service. Some of its shows had up to 1.6 billion eyeballs. There’s roughly 7.7 billion people on the planet. Now I’m not here to simply snob-sneer at Netflix. Some of its programming is excellent, much of it’s a pabulum, though: a grey gruel that can be consumed by anyone in Scotland, India, France, Nigeria, Israel or Korea. Netflix isn’t representative of global culture – would that it was – it’s representative of the commodification of global culture.

Yet we hail the ‘tech bros’ behind this crushing, levelling, coldly mechanical, rampantly greedy transformation of the world, and ourselves. Elon Musk – the tech bro’s tech bro – was just named Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Check the views of Musk, the world’s richest man, on Covid or unionisation. Between 2014-2018, he paid a ‘true tax rate’ of just 3.27% … what did you pay? Musk once called a rescuer who saved 12 boys trapped in a Thai cave a “pedo guy”. His behaviour is despicable. Yet ask many young men under the age of 25 who they admire, and he’ll come close to the top of the pile.

I’m not a luddite. I adore technology. I’m an early adopter of basically any new invention and have been since I nagged my parents to buy me an Atari in 1979. Today, I use an AI transcriber assistant in my journalism, though it’s very bad with Scottish accents.

Despite some reservations, I even think the coming of Metaverse technology, where each of us can exist online in avatar form, could be positively transformative, as long as it’s not in the hands of big corporations like Facebook (which sadly it is now). Think of the potential for personal freedom (like the liberty it may give disabled people), and the unleashing of creative and artistic energy.

However, I also think we need to slow down. Humanity has evolved technologically at a rate of knots, while in terms of our emotional evolution we’re still cavemen. Perhaps, we need a little more time to bring our emotional skills up to the same level as our technology skills. We’ve gone too far one way, and not far enough in the other.

Just look at humanity today: are we even fit for gunpowder, let alone AI?

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