November 1, 2023 - 1:15pm

The UK is well-positioned to take a leading role on the regulation of artificial intelligence. It's encouraging, then, to see Rishi Sunak seizing the initiative with the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park this week. Attendees include US Vice President Kamala Harris, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. However, the de facto guest-of-honour is a non-politician: billionaire mogul Elon Musk. Media interest is especially focused on a live-streamed conversation between Musk and Sunak, which is due to take place after the summit on Thursday evening. The early commentary hasn't exactly been marked by open-minded curiosity. Instead, the tone has been one of derision. The general idea is that Musk is a clown and Sunak a fool for agreeing to sit down with him on camera. But who are real idiots here? As a man of enormous wealth and influence, it is of course the media’s job to question, challenge and investigate Musk. But to reflexively belittle him is fundamentally unserious. For a start, there’s much more to Musk than X — the website formerly known as Twitter. We're talking about the founder and CEO of Tesla, whose electric vehicles have revolutionised the global automotive industry. That alone is enough to put him among the contemporary greats of business and engineering. However, he’s also the driving force behind SpaceX, which has transformed the economics of spaceflight, while his other ventures include tunnel construction, human-computer interfaces and satellite communications. So, even if he hadn’t helped found one of the leading AI companies (OpenAI), and despite any other faults he might have, Musk is precisely the sort of person to whom prime ministers should be talking about AI safety. That’s because keeping this technology under control depends not just on abstract knowledge, but a deep understanding of highly complex systems. Surely, we'd rather hear from people who are building the world of the future, as opposed to those who merely talk about it (a category in which I must, of course, include myself).  Least valuable are those who busy themselves with the froth and not the substance of the issues at stake. As with most matters of science and technology, it's hard to keep the media interested in AI safety. Let down by their humanities degrees, most journalists soon find themselves out of their depth. So if it’s not possible to ignore the topic altogether, a superficial angle is hungrily seized upon. This might entertain the public, but it doesn’t forewarn them. Enter Elon Musk.

Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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