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Robert Peston: 'The AI industrial revolution will be possibly the most important one since the Steam Age'
Robert Peston on why AI could trigger financial turmoil and political upheaval, and his thrilling new novel that asks ‘what if?’
Hoda Davaine/Dave Benett/Getty Images
- Ed Grenby
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When Robert Peston is panicky – and right now he is – the rest of the world should probably worry, too. The political editor of ITV News is, after all, the man who predicted both Covid and the 2008 global financial crisis while others blithely downplayed the dangers. “I do have a feeling of, ‘Why don’t people listen to me when I say things are about to go awfully badly wrong?’” he admits.
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“In the spring and summer of 2007 I was warning that what was happening in the banking sector was going to cause enormous harm to us all, and lots of politicians and people in the City wrote to the BBC [where he was business editor] to say I was scaremongering and needed to be closed down. A few years later, I’d made a ton of documentaries about China, and knew it well, and had been to Wuhan, so when this mysterious new virus turned up at the end of 2019 I said to anyone in government who would listen to me, ‘This looks serious.’”
Credentials established, what’s ringing his internal alarm bells this time round? The answer, he says, is in his latest novel, The Kill Switch: “It’s in the thriller genre, but underlying all of it are two questions: in this new AI world, who and what can you believe, and who or what is in charge?”
A black humanoid robot. Getty VCG/VCG via Getty Images
It’s a scintillating, edge-of-the-seat read all right, but its crunchingly close-to-home verisimilitude makes it hard to write off as mere fiction. The hero is a journalist with more than a passing resemblance to Peston, and the latter has clearly brought his unrivalled knowledge of the worlds of politics and economics to bear to make it real – right down to the podcast (very similar to Peston’s own) that kicks off the action when a prime minister is assassinated while appearing on it.
Far-fetched? Not at all, reckons the author, who sees the trillionaire tech-bro megalomaniacs and malign machine intelligence that drive his novel’s plot as the least of our AI worries. “I am genuinely anxious that we’re going to get a serious financial crash, globally, in the next year or two, because there is the most astonishing amount of money going into building the data centres and power plants for AI, and as we saw when SpaceX floated on the stock exchange, a late-1920s degree of breathless excitement on the markets. And I worry that the profits aren’t going to be delivered on a scale to justify all this, so businesses will go bust, investors will take fright and we will have a significant market shock.”
Concerned now? Well, it gets worse. “Despite that, the AI industrial revolution will be possibly the most important one since the Steam Age. Even if there is a financial crash, the AI infrastructure will survive it, much like we had a railway boom and bust [in the 1840s], but the railways themselves were still there after. AI and robots will displace incredibly large numbers of jobs, and there may not be conventional productive employment to replace those lost jobs, so how are people going to live? And if vast numbers lose their jobs, nobody pays income tax, so the government can’t pay for public services, and society collapses.”
That’s not to say he’s smashing up his Amazon Alexa just yet. “I’m actually a great optimist,” he claims, “but I also think we need to look at possible dystopias in order to prevent them happening.” Nor is he retreating to some off-grid survivalist bunker in the Cairngorms.
Last year he broke up with his long-term partner, fellow writer and journalist Charlotte Edwardes (thanked and praised in The Kill Switch’s acknowledgements), but now talks excitedly about “jetting back and forth” to New York, because “the new great love of my life [artist Nell Breyer] lives in Brooklyn”.
In fact (though probably in jest), he muses briefly on the possibility of emigrating there. When I ask which prime minister – he’s known eight or nine – he would most like to have had murdered on his podcast, he insists he’d want them all to leave alive. “If any of them got killed off, at that point I would almost certainly have to be looking for gainful employment in another field and on another continent. Though maybe, because of Nell, I should..?”
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The Kill Switch by Robert Peston is available to buy now.
Authors
Ed GrenbyAssociate Editor, Radio Times
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