‘I’M convinced that artificial intelligence will ultimately be either the best thing to happen to humanity, or the worst thing ever to happen.”

A chilling warning from Max Tegmark, a leading light in the US technology think-tank the Future of Life Institute, opening the docu-drama iHUMAN.

The film from Norwegian director Tonje Hessen Schei and released in the UK this week is a real-life political thriller which delves deep into the booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry, shining a light on how the most powerful and sweeping technology of our time is changing our lives, society and our future.

Its premier coincided with a call from SNP foreign affairs spokesperson Alyn Smith for the UK to be “at the forefront of negotiations to create the legal framework” around the use of killer robots in warfare.

Drones and autonomous killing machines are among the more extreme elements of AI, but as illustrated in iHUMAN, the technology surrounds us all in our daily lives, although not in as extreme a manner as the Uighurs in China. More than a million of them have been detained for “re-education” and Hessen Schei’s film said the ethnic group were under constant surveillance from cameras, facial recognition and other software. They were tracked virtually from cradle to grave, through school and further education and on to work, with their behaviour carefully monitored for indications of dissent.

Tegmark says AI is simply non-biological intelligence, while intelligence itself is simply “the ability to accomplish goals”.

“We can use it to solve all of today’s and tomorrow’s greatest problems, cure diseases, deal with climate change, lift everybody out of poverty,” he says.

“But we could use exactly the same technology to create a brutal global dictatorship with unprecedented surveillance and inequality and suffering. That’s why this is the most important conversation of our time.”

READ MORE: Pat Kane: Things to look out for in 2021, given just how biblical 2020 has been …

To say the film is dark and dystopian is to grossly simplify its content. It is fascinating, taking us behind the scenes of the tech we take for granted every day and putting us in a place where we ask just how far we want it to go. Hessen Schei describes it as a wake-up call: “For me this film is made to wake people up, and awareness is probably the best antidote to the dystopian future that might await us if we don’t step up and take back control of this technology now.

“We are facing a rapid development of AI, and we have for the most part left technology to technologists and it is incredibly important that we raise awareness of the ethical challenges of AI – so we can stop and ask the right questions, to make sure we are going the right way. We are at a crossroads and it is up to us to decide what this technology should be used for.

“I hope we ensure how we can use this technology for our common good, rather than towards spying, brainwashing and killing – which some of the experts in iHUMAN say most of the money in AI goes towards right now.”

She says it’s crucial that people are informed and recover the narrative of who we are and what world we want to live in. We must fight for our rights: “We have to. Because who we are as humans is at stake.”

Data is central to AI and several contributors voiced their concern that a handful of companies – among them Facebook, Amazon and Google – controlled the development of the technology, giving them unparalleled access to vast amounts of our personal information.

Eleonore Pauwels (below), from the United Nations University, says we are all made of data in terms of how we live our lives, which is why it is so important to big commercial interests: “Computer scientists are developing deep learning algorithms that can learn to identify, classify, and predict patterns within massive amounts of data. We are facing a form of precision surveillance, you could call it algorithmic surveillance, and it means that you cannot go unrecognised.”

Ben Goertzel, chief computer scientist at Hanson Robotics, says most of the AI development on the planet is done by a handful of big technology companies or a few large governments: “If we look at what AI is mostly being developed for, I would say it’s killing, spying and brainwashing.

“We have military AI, we have a whole surveillance apparatus being built using AI by major governments, and we have an advertising industry which is oriented towards recognising what ads to try to sell to someone.”

THE importance of data and its management also featured in an online discussion about creating an AI strategy for Scotland, that followed iHUMAN.

Among its guests were Hessen Schei, CEO of The Data Lab Gillian Docherty and Edinburgh University Professor Shannon Vallor.

While working on the film, Hessen Schei said she was scared at the power wielded by the tech companies, who operated much as “an enormous Mafia”, with unlimited cash, little transparency and no accountability.

They were largely run by young, white, very rich men – in some cases boys – who “have grown up behind their computer screens and have a very limited worldview and life experiences, and they are making decisions that affect, most

of humanity”. She added: “I really think it’s high time that we the people demand to have our voices heard and also put pressure on our international bodies and governments to get some international governance for this technology.”

Vallor agreed with the need for regulation but said the processes moved slowly and the laws themselves did not easily cross borders, while AI did.

She said: “There’s lots of discussion about what kinds of regulatory instruments might be able to adapt more quickly to what we’re seeing now … a lot of our regulations are looking backwards at harms that are already unfolding, for example, around privacy violations digital discrimination and surveillance.”

Privacy violations are one thing, killer robots another, but both have a thirst for data at their core.

Chris Reed, Professor and Personal Chair of Computer Science and Philosophy, at the University of Dundee, said the theory of AI had not changed for more than 50 years.

“I think that the kind of fear of killer robots around the corner, both literally and metaphorically, is really completely misplaced. What the iHUMAN video did do well was to show how the existing statistical and probabilistic modelling and recognising patterns ... and these things are absolutely happening. The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a perfect example of it being applied in, in some sense successfully.”

The last word for now comes from Ilya Sutskever, one of the sector’s brightest minds. He was headhunted by Elon Musk to run his OpenAI, one of the world’s top AI research labs.

In the film, Sutskever says tech is a force of nature, adding: “I feel like there is a lot of similarity between technology and biological evolution.

“Scientists have been accused of playing God for a while, but there is a real sense in which we are creating something very different from anything we’ve created so far.”