“We call them children,” he said to laughter.  

Mr Toon noted that intelligence is a “misunderstood concept” and that data without context isn’t helpful. Intelligent decisions arise from knowledge which itself is a series of connections of information. 

While much interest has been given to generative AI like ChatGPT, he said the average human brain has trillions more connections than it and artificial intelligence “is still just in the foothills”. 

It makes mistakes, hallucinates, and is fundamentally just a powerful version of predictive text. In the short-term people overestimate technology but underestimate it in the long-term, he added.  

Gender and racial bias must be removed, and big issues like privacy, deepfakes, and persuasion must be dealt with, but Mr Toon assured that the UK’s artificial intelligence unit are already considering these problems, particularly in the context of rogue states. 

The benefits will be big eventually, however. 

Mr Toon likened the systems change for industry that will come, to the electrification of factories during the industrial revolution.  

He also said AI has the power to improve our understanding of how living things are connected evolutionarily, with machine learning already uncovering that bats have complex language and even names for each other.  

Pictured: Mr Toon delivered his talk at Les Cotils. 

“We need to decide who profits from the technology", Mr Toon said, noting that 25% of the world's wealth remains in the hands of 1% of the global population. 

There will be consequences for software developers, who Mr Toon likened to intelligent monks writing great scripts. AI will eventually allow most people to instruct computers to “do your bidding”, reshaping the industry. 

The education system should also change, with the focus taken away from reading, writing and arithmetic and moved to curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking. He noted that humanities and arts students are better at feeding prompts to AI than those in STEM, and uptake shouldn’t be diminished in those fields. 

The technology was rooted in the early days of the digital age when Claude Shannon created binary digits in 1948 to successfully communicate information to a receiver. 

He said semiconductors “made all this possible” and since first being built with four transistors the now hold 100 billion of them and feature in everything from the lunar landers, credit cards, and car key fobs.  

If cars had kept up with this rate of improvement, they would travel at 200-times the speed of light. 

Mr Toon also noted that the disparity between east and west is stark on AI. Government officials in China have a strong grasp of the technology and it’s already employed to automatically wipe pornography off social media sites, while the same isn’t true in the United States.