Matthew Webster: Digital Life Real Intelligence v Artificial Intelligence

Pursuits

Hold onto your hats: the digital world is about to take a giant leap, courtesy of the much-discussed advent of artificial intelligence (AI).

We will see as much change in the next two years as we have seen in the last ten. I hope that I can keep up.

It’s about time we had a bit of progress, anyway. I realised the other day that it is over 25 years since I bought my first internet-connected computer, when the worldwide web was fresh and young. But if I look back, it’s hard to point to any really fundamental change in the underlying infrastructure, beyond its all becoming faster and more reliable. You might say that websites like

Webwatch

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Otter.ai

A benign use of AI – it can transcribe your conversations for you.

Cheaper broadband ofcom.org.uk

Anyone on a pension or universal credit is entitled to cheaper broadband. Go to Ofcom and search for ‘social tariffs’

I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk

Facebook and Twitter, which allow us to interact online, were quite a change, but they’ve been around for over eight years.

Or you might feel that the streaming services – iPlayer, Netflix, Spotify et al – were a significant development, and they were. But they really only reflected the increased availability of faster internet connections. Anyway, they’ve been churning stuff out since 2006 – so they are hardly the new kids on the block. Grandpa Microsoft was formed in 1975, almost 50 years ago.

So we are due something new, and AI might be it. AI is, essentially, software that works on existing computers and can allow them to accumulate and remember almost limitless quantities of data, way beyond human capacity.

It then identifies patterns in the data and uses these patterns to make predictions, decisions, conclusions and recommendations based on questions it’s asked. Or it even (and this is where it gets worrying) takes actions with little or no direct human intervention, such as on an aeroplane autopilot.

However, it’s impressive, even at a very basic level. Have a go at Google’s version called Bard (bard.google.com) and ask it a question. Don’t be shy – ask for something like a summary of the English county-cricket system, a limerick that starts ‘A magazine known as The Oldie’ or a speech to deliver at a friend’s retirement party.

You'll be surprised by the results. The syntax will be excellent and the structure pretty good, if perhaps a little stilted.

However, this masks the danger. Where is the information that it is so smoothly presented to you coming from, and is it accurate? It offers no citations.

Try asking it about something you really know about, and you may find some bizarre inaccuracies. I asked it about my father, and was surprised to learn that he was married to the late Countess of Longford (which he certainly wasn’t). But it was all written in such a confident and convincing way that had he still been alive, I might have been tempted to make enquiries.

As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. However good a computer is at processing data, if you give it rubbish to work with, rubbish is what it will deliver. Bard is (I assume) scraping all this stuff from websites it’s looked through, chewing it over and cobbling together some convincing words – but not carefully enough.

No doubt it will become more sophisticated, but I’d be nervous about leaving it in charge of anything with a motor if it makes mistakes at this lowest level of its capacity.

Nevertheless, this sort of mass datasifting and analysis is entirely new, and change is coming, for good or ill – or perhaps for good and ill. It could certainly be useful for operating machines, but it could also be used to spread misinformation and propaganda.

So it’s up to humans to ensure that proper ethics are observed. What could possibly go wrong?

Margaret Dibben: Money Matters

Pension tension

The older you are, the more interesting pensions become. And the more confusing. Successive governments have promised to simplify the pension system, but usually they succeed only in adding to the layers of legislation ruling our retirement income.

Even HMRC is confused. It has had to repay getting on for £1 billion, an average individual repayment of over £3,000, to pensioners from whom it has taken too much.

These are people who have used pension freedom to withdraw money above the 25-per-cent tax-free limit. The first time you do this, the Revenue imposes an emergency tax code. Instead of treating the withdrawal as a one-off payment, it assumes you will be cashing in the same amount every month for a year, giving yourself a very large annual income, which it taxes accordingly.

You won’t be over-taxed when you take a second payment from the

‘Have you seen the latest electricity bill?’ same pot, but you could be if you take a second taxable slice from a diﬀerent pension fund.

There will be no dispute about getting the overpayment refunded, but it will take time. If you fail to spot the problem, you will have to wait until the end of the tax year, when HMRC automatically puts you straight. Pension freedoms were introduced eight years ago and HMRC still hasn’t corrected the quirk.

Much else is happening to complicate pension planning. With the current cost-of-living crisis, many people are reducing their pension contributions or even stopping payments altogether, which might have devastating consequences in later life.

The amount of money you receive from state, company and personal pensions dictates how comfortable your retirement will be. Yet many people do not know how much they will receive, nor even how to ﬁnd out.

Some still don’t know at what age they become entitled to receive a state pension. A couple of months ago, the Government said it is reconsidering its plans to raise the state pension age to 68 because life expectancy has not been increasing as fast as forecast. It had intended raising it to this age in 2044-46, with later suggestions that the change might come in during 2037-39, to save the Treasury money. It now won’t review the decision until after the next Parliament.

One certainty remains for those born after April 1960 – the state pension age will rise from 66 to 67 between 2026 and the end of 2028.

A scheme that will help us keep track of how much pension we have – the pensions dashboard – has also been delayed. All your pension information, state and private, will be available in one place online, making it easy to trace odd, small pensions you may have earned from various employments.

Initially scheduled to enrol in 2019, large pension schemes were belatedly going to join the dashboard from next August, with medium and small schemes coming on board later. But the programme was put on hold last March and now no one knows when it will start.

Quite simply, we want to plan our ﬁnances, so we know we will have enough money to pay our bills and enjoy life in our retirement. No one is making this any easier at the moment.

Lady Antonia Fraser on Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit Forthcoming dates at the National Liberal Club: 1st Aug, 5th Sep, 17th Oct, 14th Nov, 12th Dec