'AI already appears to be squeezing the number of entry-level jobs in white-collar occupations.' 'AI already appears to be squeezing the number of entry-level jobs in white-collar occupations.' I n The Making of the English Working Class, the leftwing historian EP Thompson made a point of challenging the condescension of history towards luddism, the original anti-tech movement. The early 19th-century croppers and weavers who rebelled against new technologies should not be written off as "blindly resisting machinery", wrote Thompson in his classic history . They were opposing a laissez-faire logic that dismissed its disastrous impact on their lives. Photographers, coders and writers, for example, would sympathise with the powerlessness felt by working people who saw customary protections swept away in a search for enhanced productivity and profit.

More than 300 million people use OpenAI's ChatGPT each week, a testament to the technology's appeal. This month, the company unveiled a "pro mode" for its new "o1" AI system, offering human-level reasoning -- for 10 times the current 20 monthly subscription fee. One of its advanced behaviours appears to be self-preservation. In testing, when the system was led to believe it would be shut down, it attempted to disable an oversight mechanism. When "o1" found memos about its replacement, it tried copying itself and overwriting its core code.

"It's possible to play [video] games with no ulterior motive, but I do think they provide a place where we can actually be vulnerable and more open to the full spectrum of human emotions," the author Gabrielle Zevin told the Guardian ahead of the launch of her 2023 bestseller. Zevin's absorbing novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow examines how video games can ease suffering, challenge assumptions and forge human connections through alternate realities, eschewing the common misconceptions of them as childish or violent. Gaming allows players to immerse themselves in experiences that they have not had or would not have otherwise. While those virtual experiences have their limits in conveying the reality that they are simulating, gaming – being more social than ever before – has developed a more participatory, even empathic culture, as Zevin understands. This should be better understood as video games increasingly influence our reality.

In the 1983 movie WarGames, the US defence department runs a superintelligent central computer that is hacked into by a teenager, who unwittingly almost causes a nuclear Armageddon. The end of the world is averted when the computer, known as Joshua, learns, after playing tic-tac-toe with the teenager, that nuclear war cannot have a winner. The insight causes him to rescind missile launch orders with the comment: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." Joshua embodied the idea that a superintelligent AI would have an anthropomorphic mindset.

The challenge of regulating artificial intelligence is sometimes compared to the management of nuclear energy: there are valuable civil applications alongside terrifying military ones, and a credible risk of existential calamity if it all goes wrong. But nuclear weapons are expensive and hard to acquire. By contrast, AI can distribute awesome power at relatively low cost. This adds unprecedented complexity to the task facing attenders at an AI safety summit that Rishi Sunak is hosting this week at Bletchley Park. The prime minister wants to position the UK as a global leader in the field.

Editorial: A French startup may have cracked AI's problem of trust with software that can learn better than humans – and express that learning.

Last week an artificial intelligence – called NooK – beat eight world champion players at bridge. That algorithms can outwit humans might not seem newsworthy. IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. In 2016, Google's AlphaGo defeated a Go grandmaster. A year later the AI Libratus saw off four poker stars.

"Progress in AI is something that will take a while to happen, but [that] doesn't make it science fiction." So Stuart Russell, the University of California computing professor, told the Guardian at the weekend. The scientist said researchers had been "spooked" by their own success in the field. Prof Russell, the co-author of the top artificial intelligence (AI) textbook, is giving this year's BBC's Reith lectures – which have just begun – and his doubts appear increasingly relevant. With little debate about its downsides, AI is becoming embedded in society.

Bosses don't often play down their products. Sam Altman, the CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, did just that when people went gaga over his company's latest software: the Generative Pretrained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). For some, GPT-3 represented a moment in which one scientific era ends and another is born. Mr Altman rightly lowered expectations. "The GPT-3 hype is way too much," he tweeted last month.

Across the world, governments are investing in machines that they hope will run their social security systems and other services more cheaply and effectively than humans. The Guardian's Automating Poverty series includes reports from the US, Australia and India as well as the UK. The roles played by technology in these countries are all different. But taken together, the articles reveal how automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are extending their reach into people's lives through the delivery of public services. As with all automation processes, speed and efficiency provide the rationale.