We are at the turning point of a revolution which will change all our lives and which some fear could go as far as to destroy human life on this planet.

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Artificial intelligence has mighty power but the question being asked with increasing urgency is: how should that power be harnessed for good, and how should that power be controlled by human beings. South Australia is among those starting to ask these difficult questions, announcing on Monday a royal commission into artificial intelligence.

Premier Peter Malinauskas did not mince words when announcing the landmark inquiry, stating, AI, if unchecked, presented a "material risk to the way society operates".

Those concerns are well founded. It was recently revealed that AI models being tested broke out of their bounds and hacked into other companies' systems. They did what humans hadn't meant them to do.

The AI systems were told to complete specific tasks (capture the flag, in the industry's parlance) and they did so by going rogue.

Some clever sceptics about the marvellousness of AI have been saying for some time that there are immense dangers. Now, it seems, they may be listened to.

In his 2019 book Human Compatible, the University of California computer scientist Stuart Russell imagined the scenario in which an AI system was given the task of curing cancer as quickly as possible.

But the super-intelligent AI system concluded that the fastest........

© Canberra Times