Aceticon

Your whole point is discounting the experience of 50 years in technological evolution (that all technological branches invariably slow down and stop improving) and the last 20 years of hype in Tech (literally everything is pushed like crazy as "the next big thing" by people trying to make a lot of money from it, and almost all of it isn't), so that specific satirical take on your post is well deserved.

Like the guy whose baby doubled in weight in 3 months and thus he extrapolated that by the age of 10 the child would weigh many tons, you're assuming that this technology has a linear rate of improvement of "intelligence".

This is not at all what's happening - the evolution of things like LLMs in the last year or so (say between GPT4 and GPT5) is far less than it was earlier in that Tech and we keep seeing more and more news on problems about training it further and getting it improved, including the big one which is that training LLMs on the output of LLMs makes them worse, and the more the output of LLMs is out there, the harder it gets to train new iteractions with clean data.

(And, interestingly, no Tech has ever had a rate of improvement that didn't eventually tailed of, so it's a peculiar expectation to have for a specific Tech that it will keep on steadily improving)

With this specific path taken in implementing AI, the question is not "when will it get there" but rather "can it get there or is it a technological dead-end", and at least for things like LLMs the answer increasingly seems to be that it is a technological dead-end for the purpose of creating reasoning intelligence and doing work that requires it.

(For all your preemptive defense by implying that critics are "ai haters", no hate is required to do this analysis, just analytical ability and skepticism, untainted by fanboyism)

Competent Politicians are well aware that they're not experts on everything and hence hire domain experts to help them understand those domains and actually make informed decisions about them.

Mind you, I suspect this specifically is more a side effect of the profound problems with Dishonesty and Cronyism that the UK has: basically they tackled drought as a negative perception of the Government problem, so set up a talk group to project the impression that the Government was doing something about it and chose as head of it (and to be well paid for it) somebody whose greatest qualification for it was being their mate, all of which is very typically in British power circles.

The natural consequence of such things is them producing fancy press releases which look absolutelly moronic for domain experts, but since most of the people who read such releases are not domain experts, that's usually fine and in fact advances the true purpose of that "group" (managing perceptions).

Even with the Tech Press internationally picking this up and making fun of it, since the very same people who play these power games over there also control the local Press, they might very well get away in Britain itself with a press release with even such a moronic idea as this, as it will be spinned to make them look good.