Met Office | Telegraph Magazine
An intriguing assignment from The Telegraph Magazine saw me venturing down to the Met Office HQ, which is nestled in the Devon countryside near Exeter. As last July's unprecedented scorching temperatures besieged parts of the country with 40.3C temperatures, the Met Office was prompted into marshalling its resources to better respond to a new age of extremes. Writer Simon Usborne and I met and photographed the team of expert meteorologists tasked with persuading the UK public (and big industry) to better prepare for ever increasing extreme weather events. The 'extreme team' as Simon dubbed them in the article.
As well as some of the world's finest meteorologist minds the headquarters also houses a vast array of formidable supercomputers. Whilst a creeping concern of a Venus style runaway climate breakdown is certainly one of the worries I've lost sleep to over the last few years, that has recently been surpassed by my fears of an unbridled and unaligned Artificial General Intelligence. The two threats are equally frightening, but with the accelerated pace of development, rogue AI now seems vastly more pressing. With the ranks of AI alignment specialists who share this concern, I can't help thinking when I see Just Stop Oil or XR protesters that they need to refashion their placards to keep up with the latest peril. I don't mean to undermine the gravity of the threat posed by climate change, but the AI threat has emerged unexpectedly within an astonishingly short span of time. What an era to be alive, we are on the precipice of something extraordinary. The next 5-10 years is going to be a ride.
