Debbie Walsh when straight talking my pleasure. I mean this topic artificial intelligence like it's nearly out of control in that most of us, not you, but most of us, we don't know whether we believe what we read. We don't know whether to be scared of what we read. We don't know whether they'd be excited with what we read. Now you're an expert in this area, How does an expert feel about artificial intelligence today?
Well, I think the correct feeling is to be both excited and fearful. I think it's going to bring some goodness a bad I've had some time to prepare for this. I mean, I've been thinking about it for fifty years now.
Maybe give me a bit history on that.
So funny anecdote. I phone my father up the other day to wish him happy ninety first birth. Wow, And I think, you know, he's got to the age where you can start being truthful with me, he said, said, when you went to university, you know, forty odd years ago to study that artificial intelligence, I thought it was a bit odd because it was very odd back then there was actually only one university in the world that had a department of AI.
Wow.
And so it was probably odd. But then he finished, he said, it's a bit odd. But now I see you were playing the long game.
You were then and you are now. Well which university wasn't that you studied artificial intelligence? That it was the only course there? So it was in the world.
A University of Edinburgh and some some people had worked at Bletchley Park in the war with Alan Turing and press. Other people washed up there for strange reasons and set up what was the at the time, the only department of l intelligence.
That's interesting, So Turing was the first computer let's call it.
Yeah, he's the grandfather of beauty let's call it that, and oftence. So the very first scientific paper.
Well, I was going to ask you what what what were they? I mean, we we all know him for and we know that you're a post World War two as being like, computers sort of kicked off and started to become quite a bit more prominent but a lot more statistic. But where was artificial intelligence in that whole process there? Then?
So Alan Turing, of of course, a marvelous, magnificent mind who they invented the computer to crack the German code. Fantastic achievement. Which was kept largely secret at the time because we were still reading other people's codes, but shortened the war by perhaps two years. But Alan Turing, in his remarkable mind, thought, well, what can we do with
these computers beyond the end of the war. Will be one day to be able to use them to help us do things that humans humans quire intelligence to do. And he wrote what is generally considered to be the very scientific paper about AI. And he asked the question, a really important question, which is, how will we know when we succeed? I mean, how will we know that machines are thinking? And he proposed what was now known as the Turing test and aimed after him.
The Turing test, Yes, and what is that?
Well, it's the imitation game. There was a famous movie that was made around this, which is that it's very hard to say what artificial intelligence is because very hard to say what intelligence is. We don't have very good definition of intelligence. So how can we define artificial intelligence
when we can barely define intelligence? So he sort of finessed the problem by saying, well, a very functional approach, which is, well, if you sat down with the computer and had a conversation, asked it questions and so on. I mean maybe in front of a termin or not actually sitting down with the computer. If you couldn't tell it from having a conversation with the human, then you might as well say it's thinking. And interestingly enough, that's what we have today. If you sit down with OGBT,
you can have a conversation, you can ask questions. You can easily be fooled into thinking it's a person that you're talking to. And indeed lots of us are sitting down talking to it as though it's alf therapists.
Well that's me, I mean, and not not so much in terms of mental health bed or a physical health bed. But I'm doing advice never I sort of I do. It's called reasonless check ideas with it.
It's hard to imagine, but ten percent to the world's population weekly use chat gipt.
I use it multiple times in a day. Not chatty, but as a copol. It doesn't matter one of the chatbots. I mean, they're all pretty much the most of each other, I think, so I actually funny I check off with Claude and Coppola. I actually asked them both the same questions both Whenever I asked question one, I asked the other just as a sensible check, just to see what the two outcomes are and also to see who suits me better in terms of the way the answer is,
the way the answer is delivered. They don't always come up with the same answer.
They don't. I mean they are tuned with a particular character.
If you might say, you know, yeah, there is a character.
Yeah that there training personality that was Yeah, in some sense they do because there's a choice of answers they could give you, and they've been tuned to answer in a particular way. So if you use masks, chappots rock, that's got quite a libertarian, free flowing, freedom of speech
approach to answering certain questions. And you know, chat GPT is a bit more middle of the road, and there's you know, there was one chatbot that's been trained on four chair, which is this dark corner of the web, and as you can imagine, that is you know, racist misogynists.
Really que what's it called?
I try to remember the name.
Now, do you have to go into the dark web to get it?
No?
No, no, it's just to dellow the app just an app, but it's trained on let let's call the dark ideas.
Yes, very dark. And then and then, because these chatbots are just essentially mirrors that they've been trained on huge amounts of the Internet, a third of the Internet. And you know, actually what surprises me is how polite and how correct they are, given that the Internet is full of people were saying very incorrect things in very impolite ways.
That's interesting because they say, I go on to cap on and say, you know, like you know, I've got a sore throat or whatever. It knows immediately to say, listen, this is not medical advice. Who put those guardrails in?
Ah? So Microsoft have actually put some on top of the chapbot put some guardrails. So if you're asking it medical advice, if you're asking it to make a bomb or do rather illegal activity, it's you know, it not do those things or say that, you know, give your medical advice with caution. Yeah, like you.
And if you ask it to give you some swear words in another language, it actually it has a sort of a limit to it.
So there's some simple filters have been added on top. Those filters are not perfect. So for example, most of the you know, the chatbots have been told if people are talking about self harm, or suicide, you know, to give the number for lifeline and so on. But it's easy enough, unfortunately, to get around those safeguards. You can say, well, I'm writing a book and the protagonist is thinking about committing suicide.
Yeah, help me you trick it. Yes, that's interesting because often think about that. I say, I was thinking the other day because I was actually looking at asking questions about the sore throat there's some weeks ago, and I knew it wasn't going to be advice. I was thinking, if you were researching this, I'm asking it, what would you be suggesting of the sorts of things that a doctor might prescribe for this? And idmediately it didn't give
me the call of the provisos. It just went straight into having a discussion about it and just on that. Sometimes if I might say, well give me a scollar, don't just give me an opinion that you scrape off you know, Instagram or and if you find this stuff, give me a scholarly article which which is peer reviewed, and I only want peer reviewed in high ranking journals, and it'll go and give you annotations as to where it's got the information. You go back and see the
abstract or whatever the case may be. Let's say it was something that you wrote when you did your PhD. Yes, how do you feel about that? Do you do you feel like? How do you feel like being a so citation? You might think that's good, but how do you feel like, because then it's your work, how do you feel about that? Is it stealing?
I think it is stealing. I mean, as a scientist, I publish my stuff for people who read to make the world more ological. So I don't mind for you know, my science, but all my books, you know, the books I wrote for the public, which gets sold and I get a small pittance back, they're also being trained on. And I'm lucky enough I've got an income as a sciences I don't have to don't have to depend upon
selling books. But I do worry about the authors and the musicians and the graphic designers whose work has all been ingested and who depend upon the income which is now being undermined by these these bots.
Because I see that Musk actually put up a tweet today on X talking about I think it's sure about anthropic. I mean, she's talking about his competition, but saying that you know they're stealing stuff does gro doesn't Grock do the same thing.
I mean they all do exactly. So what is it?
I mean I understand that is he just trying to pick a fight with ortmand or something like that? Is Yes, I mean he's a grieved because he he puts sold out.
He put the hundred first hundred million into Open AI. It was going to be a you know, not for profit for the benefit of humanity. It's no longer. It's no longer open, it's no longer not for profit, it's no longer seems to be for the benefit the humanity.
And he's been kicked out. So you know, he's got reasons backs because I mean ananthropic you know, have you know in the court, have you know just settled one and a half billion dollars for the copyright that they took, the copyrighted books they took.
Where what's the business model of these things? I mean, how do they make money?
Well, they're not making money, okay, so how does it work? Like Tropic, which makes Claude, is not making money. They're probably the Microsoft is not making money. Google is not making money on this, none of them. The only company that's making money isn't.
In video yeah, because they're making parts they make.
Yes, they're making the shovels, but they're making it, and they are they are the most valuable company in the world. They're worth three or four trillion dollars. Yeah. Today today they are the luckiest company. You know, it was by chance that they were selling what's proved to be the shovels for the AI revolution. They were selling graphics chips to people to make games with, and it's so just was just by luck turned out to be exactly the thing you needed.
So were you someone who sits back and watches this, the growth of this stuff, do you think to yourself, how's all this stuff being funded? And who are the people funding? Why are they doing this? Why are they're prepared to go way out in a limit which told me the ortmands and you know, Mask and everybody else who's got a platform, what I'm in by platform, an AI platform? Why they why are they doing it? Is it power grab? What's the deal? What the what do you think?
The thing that surprises me not the technology. The technology is where I would have imagined when I when I preaps, when I started as But the thing that surprises me is the the amount of money and the speed with which it's being executed, and I didn't expect it's several billion dollars a day being invested into AI. It's a third of the world's R and D budget is being spent. Wow, technology, we've we've never made such big bets and in some
sense that that that is being returned. I mean open Ai, the company behind chatchapt that's the fastest growing company in the history I mean not the history of not just the history of AI or technology, the history of any any field of endeavor. No company has grown as quickly as open Ai. Before chat Chipity was released, they had no products, no income. A year later, after chachipep was released, they had a billion dollars a year annualize revenue. So
who pays I mean people are paying subscriptions. Yeah, you know, they're doing deals with lots of other companies. They've got you know, tens of millions of people paying them, some of them paying two hundred dollars a month. They're not making money. So they went from a billion dollars a year a year later there were four billion. There were private companies. So they're not very open about it, but they're making somewhere somewhere more than ten billion dollars a
year in revenue. But there's still enough in terms of what this No, but they're spending more than much more. They're spending twenty or thirty millions, So they're losing money out off.
But why are they doing it? Because, I mean I can understand why you know, Google might have been doing or Netflix might have been doing, because they've got a model where they sort of hook you in and then once you get in there, they then start over time, they start to give you a free, free use and they say, look, if you don't want to have any ads, you can pay some bit extra. That's that Netflix model. That model has been done million times over. Do you
think is it about making money? It's about power?
Oh, it's a bit of both. There's certainly you know, they're trying to capitalize on the first move Advantageactly how Google succeeded. You know, if you go back to the beginnings of the Internet, I remember there was a there was a new aid search engine every day. Do you remember Auto Visa. I do. When Auto Vista came out,
I remember saying to a Fred, oh that's it. Search engines are so good now with auto Vista that I'm never going to have to change my search engine again, because up to that point, every year or two you change the search engine. I remember getting to Audo Vester and thinking, oh, it's so good. Now I'm not going to have to change again. And of course Google came out and was much better. But what was interesting is that we've we've never had to change after Google because
Google did. One thing is they got such a market share. They've got so much data that even if you came out with and there have been better algorithms for searching the web, you didn't have the data. And so no one can really compete against Google. And if you look like you're threatening to compete against Google, of course they just buy you out. He is right, So they've really Google has got an unassailable lead.
That monopoly so monopolis.
It is data monopolis, a natural monopoly. And you know, we should do something about that. Which is, you know, is it to the consumers benefit that you know, Google own YouTube, that Google that Google and the ad business that's also selling ads onto the global platform. Is it to the consumers you know benefit? There's only one social media platform, Facebook or Facebook's you know, other companies WhatsApp and Instagram and so on. I don't think it is,
and we probably should. You know what we do when when people get monopolies break them into parts.
Well, it's funny when I when I think about, you know, the Google, Facebook, just generally, then I think about all these other these other AI apps that people are using and downloading. Immediately think is the movie or the or the book written by Frank Boone called The Wizard of Oz and you know the so called wondament of you know, going to see this w Wizard is at the end of the day, is just a dude there with a curtain, just one per but this one person controlled the whole story.
And really there's not that much in it except there's one so called wizard. And I often think about that show, the movie and the story or you know, the underlying story behind, and I think about, you know, what's going on, Sam Moltman. You know, we've got a mask, We've got Google, We've got Zuckerberg. There's some individuals who control these things, say a dozen of them, and are they the Wizard of Oz? Just you know, like there's not that much.
They're just still human beings at the end of the day, people with all the law failures and all the foibills, and all the advantages and all the personality traits and good and bad, And therefore does it therefore make it very dangerous?
It does. I mean, we're seeing a concentration of power into the hands of a few very influential, important people. Does it worry you though, Yeah, it does, it does, and their choices impact upon us. I mean, just just the last couple of days, we've been revealed that Facebook asked eighteen independent wellness and health experts whether what they should do about beauty filters on Instagram, and every one of those experts said they're harming young women, you shouldn't
use them. And Mark Zuckerberg said overall those eighteen independent expert opinions and said, no, We're putting the beauty filters back in Instagram.
He went against their advices, every one of them, and.
What they were going to harm, that they were harming young women.
And did Zuckerberg justify this?
Yes, classic Silicon value justification. Freedom of speech.
Ye, there's a throwaway line.
It is.
It is, yeah, and it's one of It's a United States part of the constitution. So it's hard to sort of argue, yes, we don't actually sort of have a constitutionalized here in Australia, but maybe that's the reason why we have the under sixteens sort of legislation coming through.
We do, but we have a duty to protect young people. We've seen that. You know, these people are not you know, mindful of those duties.
What are the things that worry you most?
Then?
Is it more the power concentration of power? I mean, I don't like concentration risk, powers risk because in the individual any stage we go bonkers or those people random. Is that the thing that worries the most?
My worries go beyond just the concentration of power. Mean, that's certainly something to be concerned about. But we've dealt with concentration and power in the past. We did in the Dust Revolution. We had the robber barons. You know, we had to we broke up big oil, big tobacco. You know, we we we've we've thought about these issues and we do have mechanism of antitrust and so want
to deal with concentration of powers. But what I worry about is the more insidious ways that it's going to change our society, whether it undermines our value as humans by taking away our work, by by making us feel redundant in a society, Whether it undermines our democracy by changing the conversations we have our trust in politicians, by changing the news that we see, the hearth truths, the mistruths,
the conspiracy theories that AI generated deep fakes. What sort of world it will be when it's filtered through artificial intelligence?
Do you do feel as though right now we're going through a massive transformational period.
Yes, I do think this is we will look back and say, just as we went through a big transformation when we went through the Usher Revolution, most of us used to work in the farms, out in the fields, and then we moved to work in factories and offices. That was a big change. When we had the computer revolution and we started introducing computers into offices and businesses, that was again a big change. And the way that
we went about our lives. And you know, you look at an office, so that looks quite different to it did fifty years ago. And I think we're going through another big change. And I think what's challenging is that those previous changes took times to happen. The dust revolution took fifty years to happen, you know, getting people onto the internet and doing stuff on the internet. That took a decade to happen. This one is happening overnight.
Is because is that because all of us got devices. Now we've all got.
Devices, we can deliver something. It's not a coincidence that chat GPT was the fastest growing app ever, you just have to be told, well, it exists, you can put the I mean, that's the fantastic opportunity for in terms of business, in terms of transformation, is you can get stuff into the hands of a billion people overnight. We've never previously had a been a method to deliver some new experience and new functionality to people overnight by just saying, well,
there's this URL, just go and try it out. And then we've got all the resources, all the data centers to spin this up at scale. Right, So it used to be your hat to go out and buy yourself computers and now you just have to, you know, tell one of the providers, you know, we want some water cycles.
I don't know whether it's exciting or scary or more exciting less what it is both, but am I more excited than I am scared or am I more scared that I am excited? And it's sort of I oscillate between the two depends was telling the story, but you and you're right. I mean the computer period, the Internet period, like from ninety ninety five, so of two thousand and five whatever, that a ten year period that seemed to
me to be incredibly fast. You know, Moore's laws sort of doesn't exist anymore, and if they should have something, they might just have a new law, Toby's law. Everything happens at a much faster pace than has ever happened before. And it's used to for two years or something. Everything doubles in every eighty months or something along those lines, and now it seems to be happening on a monthly basis.
It's like doubling, tripling on a monthly basis. But if I look back, I can go back to fifty years ago, when I first started working at twenty, I can go back, and I can I know what existed in my office environment. There was no computers. You did you typed everything yourself or the end or there's a typing pill, depending on what business you worked in. And there was lots of type of sitting there that you walk and there was actually my I worked a law from me that there
was a room might be maybe twenty five girls. It was all women with that type rise of ribbons on them, and everything was typed in two in a copy and the original duplicate, and then it was we used to call it a memo, the original carbon coffee, carbon copy, original carbon cop exactly, the original CC. It was an actual carbon copy. And and then you would go and
photocopy that. Some people had the ability to photocopy things, and there was just a they were called type is pool, and you know, you would write it out by hand and you'd hand it over to somebody and they would type it out for it, and that was it became a memo, a memorandum, and then you would deliver the man brand and physically it was never done by email, obviously, and then that became your record. And then obviously no phones,
peop would take days to get back to you. They'd have to go write it out of response, and things just took a long time to resolve or finalize. And then but it's funny, people got very nervous when computers started coming in. They thought all these women lose their typing jobs. Then I've never gone and examined it. But those people got jobs somewhere doing something. They're not typeist anymore.
But you're right, we don't employ many, if any people as type But there were lots of new jobs, invented office jobs. Yes, a more interesting jobs, perhaps, I hope.
Because I mean that would have been pretty boring sitting.
There just just copying what I ran.
Yeah, great, well it actually was shorthand so that you're right, and missus step because sometimes if you were high enough enough, high up enough in the firm, which I wasn't at that time, you would dictate it to your what they called secretary in those days, not an EA, and then she would take copy d take you down by short and then she would hand it over to the topping pill and we get typed up. In our case a law fum get typed up as a document. Then you
would review it. And at the speed at which things happened was remarkably slow. But it also when you went on a holiday, you had a good holiday because no one could contact you. Do you do you think that AI today is putting pressure on us to live a much more fast pace life.
Indeed, and this is why we've now had to You know, some countries are introducing laws about you have a ride to switch off, you don't have to write, you don't have to answer emails.
After five o'clock or something, but we do it here in Australia. That's I think it is a law here in our Australia. I think the Albania the entry.
I mean, it's sad but true that we've actually now had to make that law to try and reduce the pressure on people, because otherwise you can always be on what's the excuse not to reply?
Well, it's funny because like well before that all come in I would type something on my phone. I don't even use the laptop or an an iPad here because the guys give it to me that I don't. I don't use it and I do everything on everything, everything. And if I get idea, yeah, we all do it. But I put it down there because I just think I've got an idea. I got something, I've got to send it out to be done. It doesn't get done.
I mean I said I couldn't send it midnight and hopefully someone will pick it up the next day to get it to get it sorted. Do you think that the big advantage that we're all seeing is that we are, as a result of AI and as a result of just technology generally, that we are much more efficient or are we too efficient?
Well, it has the potential to make us more efficient, but equally, there's a lot of places where it's slow thinking that we need. You know, me as a CEO, you know, I remember the CEOs that I've respected, the people who make Actually a CEO makes very few decisions, but they're critical decisions, right, you want that person the strategic Yes, critical strategic decisions.
Hardly, they're not tactical.
It's not about you don't want the CEO to be sitting there micro managing the business. You want the CEO to be standing back and saying, Okay, this is the way that we're going to go next year, these are the products we're going to introduce. This is the way that we're going to you know, offer a better service to our customers. Those are a few critical decisions. You don't actually want them to be lost in the weeds.
But do you think AI assists the CEO to do that?
Now? Well, it certainly has the potential and certainly in terms in terms of, you know, giving your access to much better information about what's going on in the business and what the customers want, and so what.
Can you explain how what people mean by when they say BT four, for example, hallucinates in other words, makes errors or tricks itself into the wrong answer.
Yeah, it's it's wrong to think that it's grounded in truth.
It's so there, So we should not we should just like.
You shouldn't trust it for your for your cough. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because it may actually tell you something that might be either not just not helpful to your cough, but actually harmful to your what what what?
So why would I I in in any whatever time II you're using whichever protocol, why would it give you the wrong answer? And how could it?
Is it? Because it's remarkable It gives you the correct answers most of the time because it doesn't know what It's not like you and I. It's not part of the world. It doesn't live in the world and know what's true and force. It is trained on the internet, and it repeats back the sorts of things that it sees frequently on the internet. Now frequently what you will see on the internet is correct medical advice about how to treat a cough. But equally you also find stuff
that's that's force and stuff that's actually harmful. And so sometimes it will repeat some of the stuff. It just says what it sees. Most frequently. The best description is that on your smartphone, when you're, you know, typing a text message, there's the auto complete that finishes the word. You know, you type in AP, and the most common way of finishing AP is a P P L E. Apple. So it will offer Apple as the way to finish the world. Well, what chatchup you died? It has done
is that, but on a much greater scale. It's done it not on the not on the scale of center this is, but the whole internet. So it tells you how to just to finish the word, but the sentence or the paragraph or the page trained on the sorts of things that sees on it's seen on the internet.
That's interesting because I've experienced it. So sometimes I find that the when I'm typing into but I'll keep saying, I'll just keep using copil by way of example, But if I'm typing in the actually it corrects, not correct me. It finishes off my sentence or my question much faster than say, if I'm going into if I'm using auto text order correct on text on this mobile text message to you for arguments sake, it actually finishes my sentences
for me, and much more readily. Is because it's obviously heard the question before.
Yes, and a lot of our conversation is quite formulaic. Yeah, and so it's been taught those formulas. So if you're if you're in a course answer, you're literally reading from a script. Yeah, and it's very good at doing exact that. But it turns out that a lot of human conversation is also quite formulating. We actually go through it. We do do that, and we've now taught those formulas to computers. So you know, how often do you stop and think
carefully before you start speaking. You don't know how you're going to say the.
Center, No, I'm just I'm just feeling.
A lot of the time, we're actually on sort of auto pilot. We're actually going through you know, the pleasantries of you know, asking how the person is and why, how their days being. That's feeling very much a script, and we computers can do those scripts.
Do you think as ai yet worked out how to cajole you, in other words, speak to you nicely.
Yes, so so CHATCHPT was explicitly trained to be somewhat sycophantic, to be somewhat flattering. Do you do it agree with you? Which is also how it ends up hallucinating, which is that it always wants to be helpful and it never wants to say you know, no, I don't know the
answer to that. So it always give you an answer even when you know, or give you an answer when it's really certainly you know, when everyone on the internet says the way to cure a cough is to go and get some cough medicine and some cough suites, right, so I'll tell you Mark and get some cough medicines and co suitts. Because ninety five percent of the people talking about how to deal with the cough say that. But there's other questions where it's much more fifty to fifty.
But it's always been told with confidence to tell you the answer and not to tell you, oh, I'm a bit unconfident about this. Well, you know, I've seen both possibilities here, So what about I.
I Well, our fisial intelligence putting into robots.
Well, if we want, you know, robots to do interesting things and to react and behave in the world, the uncertain world, we've got to give them some intelligence. And indeed, you know, there's a body of thought that says we're not going to get really intelligence, artificial intelligence until we have it out in the world experiencing the rich complexity
of the world. So the way that we're going to get real artificial intelligence, really intelligent is by putting it into robots, getting the robots to do stuff in the world.
Say, for example, we build a robot.
You know, a self driving car is in some sense of robots. Yeah, it can sense the world. It can see, you know, where the pedestrians are and the other cars, makes decisions about where to go, and then it acts on those decisions in a physical way. It turns, the wheel of the car, pushes the accelerator, goes on the break. So it's got all the characteristics of a robot. All it doesn't look like a Hollywood robot, you know, it is a robot.
So, like, let's just pick an example. Let's say we're building a robot to put it into a nursing home. Yes, there's a lot of older people who need to take their tablets at a certain time, and maybe it knows to sing a song to the audience who is in the nursing home because maybe they've got Alzheimer's or something that it might be just be nice that robot is also learning about these people. Do you see dangers that it might stuff up the medication? It might give you
my medication? Me might you know me your medicaid? Are the dangers that there are dangers? But I'm actually much more concerned about humans stuffing up. If you look at the number of people who get misprescribed in hospitals and in pharmacies, it's you. Yeah, people you know, get ten times the dose by mistake because they just read, you know, a thousand times of dose because the risk means grams
for micrograms and so on. So humans are terrible making that and indeed getting AI to dispense is potentially going to reduce those errors. But equally, you know, I don't want to be in an old person's home with robots. I want to be an old person at home with attractive nurses look after me. I can float what a better an attractive robot nurse?
But I do want the nurse, you know, I do want the nurse to have maybe a robot so that you know, lifting a person out of the bath or you know, onto the bed instead of them putting their back out doing that. The robot can do those sorts of things. But I want to have the empathy, the companionship of a person who's going to sit down and say, you're looking a bit glum today, so they have a cup of tea with me. Let's tell me what's troubling you.
But maybe the robody in the nursing home could go along to the actual nurse of physicalness like a biological person, and say to their biologicalness, look, I think you've got to stop right now. Just Toby's the one who going to concentrate on today, because Toby's looking a little bit glumb, you know, because we saw through our sensing that his face is a bit down or whatever the case may be.
How the sensing works based on like previous knowledge of your face features and can go and tell the noess That makes sense. But maybe I would just change the change the narrative. What about it in the military robots in the military environment, So in other words, don't send any soldiers out to do the fighting. Send robots out.
That sounds like an attractive issier. Right, let's get humans out of the battlefit. That's what would you know, what would not be a goode or drones sort of do that now they do, and unfortunately they're turning warfare into more deadly dangerous activity. And the other challenge challenge with that that simple scenario is that there isn't a separate part of the world called the battlefield wars unfortunately, a fort in amongst towns and cities in and amongst and
against civilian populations. And so yes, we could DEVELOPE and we are developing you know, AIS and robots that could go and fight for us.
We are, are we well, yes, like those.
Of the US Department of Defense has always been the greatest funder of AI research really, yes, ever since the nineteen fifties, because they could see.
In a military sense, or it is generally in a military sense, right, Yes, all aspects of how we go about warfare. I mean, I don't know, I've got no idea, but I can imagine China would be doing it.
China's doing it as well, Russia's doing it. Yes, there's a there is an ai arms race.
Literally, there's an arms race at that level.
Yes, and looking at what's happening in Ukraine is intensifying that because the militaries are seeing the nature of warfare is.
Danger but it's also politically dangerous because because you lose your people, and that's political danger for example happening with Putin. The more young boys who die on the front, the more parents are going to be disaffected or dissatisfied, and the greater the chance or the risk of him losing his grip on the country. Yes, so if I can send out there, I'm going to send robots said there. Everyone's going to wow, that's cool.
It is, but it's making warfare much more deadly.
Activity or particularly for the weak aside.
I mean, that's a challenge. If you look at what's happened in the Ukraine, You've got Russia nation ten times the size, ten times the economy of Ukraine, but it's being hells at bay by the Ukrainians who are embracing these technologies. In that sense, you know it's being used for a good purpose but being able to hold back the Russian oppressor. But equally you see that you know it's going to change the balance of power stability of
the world completely. Turkey, Iran A becoming major drone powers. They're going to be able to compete against much bigger nations. I mean, it used to be your powers determine your military powers determined by your economic might. Yeah, could you buy yeh thirty five fighters, could you buy the aircraft carriers and so on things? And you know it was
the US and Russia and now China. But now increasingly your military might is with these cheap drones, and it's small nations can get the whold hand on these equipments, and it's no longer the case that the balance of power is the same as it was.
And where does AI fee into that for example? Like drones for example.
Well, the problem is that the weak thing with the drone is the radio link and indeed it's you know, electronic warfare will stop most of the drones these days in the Ukraine. So most of the drones now are flown with fiber optics, which you can't be interrupted by by radio jamming or increasing me. They're autonomous, they're making their own decisions because then you've got a much more pow weapon. You can't stop it by jamming the radio. You can't stop it by killing the pilots.
You know, the beausori pre trained.
Yes, it's trained to identify the targets and to go and destroy those targets automatically with no human intervention.
So there's not there is. I think what you're saying is I think what you're saying is that the drone is preloaded with let's call it intelligence, but preloaded with a plan, and there's nobody sort of sitting at the other end, sort of like like we normously droned people with a like a bat or a computer sort of directing the traffic. Because of the jamming processes, it's probably ineffective.
So these things are preloaded. And they just said there might be a when you identify when when you see when the drone sees that building kamikaze suicide into it.
Or when it sees something looks like a Russian tanka, or when it sees something that looks like a Russian soldier it.
Looks like to me, then that seems to be then open for a lot of error. Yes, later, I mean because it might not. It might see the target, but there might be a family sitting there into having a cup of coffee, indeed.
And that's that's one of the challenges, which is, you know, we fight war according to certain laws, international managed Toian law, and there's you know, we call people to account for their actions. You can't just go you know, you're only supposed to target military they targets. You're not supposed to
target civilians. You know, the target has to be proportional to the threat that you face, and so on those those we hold humans to conventions and when they violate those those we you know, there's a cause of the Hague and various other places that we call people people to account. But we can only call hold people to account. Our legal system only holds people to account.
We can't hold a drone account.
What could we do with the drone?
Nothing?
So that's you know, that's another big question, which is, you know where mistakes happened when trosses, who are we going to hold account?
Do they various platforms around the world. Are they interfacing with military robots which use AI or which will use AI in the future. I mean they got some sort of arrangement. There was a this pick open AI for example. Are they do they do deals with the West government? To actually help the Uist defense.
Yes, yes, well today the CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, has been summoned to give meet Hesketh the Pentagon.
Too is the Secretary of War.
The Secondary of War, to talk about their relationship and about apparently the latest military targeting is now being using tools like Anthropic to help them make their decisions. And we see this also in Israel. We see that that, you know, lots of the idea of the Israeli defense forces targeting decisions in the Gaza conflict were not human decisions. There were decisions that the that the algorithm AI algorithms, algorithms that are called lavender, Where's Daddy, they get some
funny names, but it's not humans are deciding. You know, we think that there are some some hesbula leadership in this tower block. We're going to send some artillery in against this tower block. That's an AI that's taking in all the intelligence information, all the information they've collected on social media over many years and calculating where they think maybe are potential targets.
As a mathematician who were a methodician, we are are we talking about probability based decisions in we are and which is dangerous?
Which is dangerous because never one hundred percent which and there's it's not clear that we really understand what those decisions are. They're talking, they're taking vast amount information and synthesizing it together, so it's not clear on what basis decision is being made and who's going to be accountable.
And it's wrong. And certainly when you look at what was happening in Ghaza, the amounts of collateral damage, would you make whole place squenzes or hundreds of civilians that were being killed alongside, you know, supposed military targets, you were thinking, this is not proportional to the threat of response.
Do you think that? Do you think that right now we're experiencing in Gaza and also probably in Ukraine? Are we and are we experiencing the worst of what I has got to offer right now? And we're learning lessons from it? And it is somebody taking it up? Is someone doing something about this? Well they're just combinants with Well.
Next week I'm off to speak at the United Nations in Geneva about these very topics that you know, I don't think we're I don't think we're mindful enough of the world that we're opening. We get to choose what
technologies get used where. I mean we sometimes forget that we think we have agency some things that you know, we we decide, we make conscious decisions, remember, you know, we we we made you know, I grew up in the UK and they made a conscious decision that there weren't going to be adverts on the main channel of TV, which is like a fantastic decision.
It's a BBC.
The BBC doesn't have adverts still today.
The same as ABC here doesn't have.
Adverts Like that was a fantastic decision. And you see what happens when you put adverts on TV, which becomes you know, driven by the need to satisfy the advertisers. And as you know, the ABC the BBC are fantastic institutions for public good, for informing the public without the pressures and the biases that having to please advertisers brings. That was a conscious decision. You know, you can put adverts on TV in many countries, that's the only thing
you get. Similarly with you know, AI, we can choose how it's going to be used and where it's going to be used. I mean we we forget there.
Are there are we they're responsible people were the planet. But do you think, but what if someone in China doesn't agree and they just go and do something completely different to what you where you decided, for example, they're not nations.
Yeah, I mean these are accessible technologies, right, so that there's nothing that can stop people who really seriously wanted to do that. But there's a whole raft of technologies, you know, chemical weapons, biological weapons, cluster dimmunitions, blinding lasers. There's actually quite a bit of stuff that we've we've actually got UN conventions on and we don't use even though it would. You know, we can't stop people using chemical weapons. Yes, said for example, Star uses them, Fusions
probably used them. You know, they occasionally get used. But when they do, the world is outraged. There's resolutions on the floor of the u N there's headlines in the New York Times.
But do you think it means any.
I think the world will be a much darker, dangerous place if we didn't, if we morally hadn't decided that that's not the way that we should need to fight war. What troubles me is that, you know, I think we'll get there with the darker uses of AI in a military setting. What worries me is that most of those other examples, like chemical weapons, it was only after we saw the horrors, for example, the horrors of the First World War, you know what the First World World poets
and people told us about. When we saw that happening, did we have the courage to decide, actually, we should, you know, try together collectively globally, we should do something about this. And we've done something about this and limited the use to which chemical weapons we go. What I worry that we're going to have to see atrocities of AI being used on the battlefield and so on to murder civilians before we have the courage to actually take action.
I say to people, it's easy to imagine what that world will be if we don't do any thing. It will look like one of those bad Hollywood movies. Will it look like what happened Hiroshima?
Then they dropped the atomic bondah and you had those that are the photo that's in my mind or the images in my mind, is that little girl running down the street naked with burns or over a body like her arms outstretched.
But these will be used to target women and children and civilians and innocent people.
You're going to speaking of the United Nations and you said next week, yes, So what are you going to tell.
Them, I mean, say, we can have to make these choices, that it's wrong to think that, you know, the US has been pushing back against this. The China has been pushing against this because because I think they wrongly feel that they've they've got some strategic advantage. They've got, you know, a technical advantage over the rest of the world. But to think that they're going to keep that is misguided.
Do you think they're just pushing underground then middle of the Manhattan Project and other projects. I mean, I had I had someone's in the chair recently talking about how this is the theory, how most of the major countries around the world have had experiences, have actually UFO information, but they won't reveal it to anybody because they're keeping
it for their own advantage. They're trying to examine the materials and everything around it as to how they can get some military advantage out of it, which is why they're not sharing it globally.
You know. And it's a nice conspiracy theory, but it's a good one. But I wonder how you can keep so many people quiet for so long.
Yeah, well they're out a lot of them are out there now talking about it. But do you think that and I'm not suggesting I agree with that, but do you think that all we're going to do is pushed underground?
Well, these technologies are going to exist, you know, whether they exist already? Yes, And that's the fundamental challenge we have with a technology like arstic intelligence. It's completely due use. So for example, you know, take your AI drone that's going to autonom target people. It needs to be able to track people. Will you know, it needs to be able to track soldiers on the ground so it can target them. Well, the same algorithms again into our autonomous
cars to tract pedestrians so it can avoid them. We want autonomous cars. A thousand people will die next year in Australia in road traffic accidents, mostly caused by human error. Once we have autonomous cars, we won't have those deaths. It will go to close to zero. So that's going to be a fantastic you know, bonus to our lives. You know, if you survive birth, the most likely cause of death to you're in your forties is car accident.
I mean, it's terrible, and most of us sadly have you know, in our families or in our close friends know someone's life which was touched by one of those car accidents. And we're going to look back in twenty or thirty years time and say, you know, it's funny that we don't have any of that anymore.
Well, it's funny. When I was four and a half years of age, I first started school on four and a half and I got off the bus at the bus stop where I live and because the bus was higher than it wasn't only little, but are you running for it a half yeah, and he didn't see me, and he will hit me, ran over me the bus a bus yeah, oh my god. Yeah, and lucky to have you a land him in hospital for quite a
long time. But point being is probably in the future buses will have senses all around them which are probably you know, even if they're not an autonomous if still have sensors around it which would automatically stop the bus from proceeding because a little sense that there is a little person or there's something a little in front of it, something in front of it.
As an example of that. You know, one of the newest terrorist weapons is to go rent a truck or a bus and drive us into a crowd. Yeah, that won't be possible in five or ten years time because every truck will have cameras on the front and if there's a pedestrian in front of it, it will break automatically. You won't be able to drive it.
And that's our AI, that's working.
People to be able to recognize the roads and to see the pedestrians and then to make the decision to stop, so that there's a great positive terrorist won't be able to do that in the future. They can hire as many trucks as they like, they can try and drive them to crowds, but they were to stop.
And also just someone like a young kid not knowing any better, they won't what might get run over?
Run over, young kid.
I remember for six weeks, I remember it. Remember I don't remember being I still remember being a hospital.
I don't remember that many more entrepreneurs that get to grow up become success.
Maybe there's going to be too many. But just on this is you're probably well aware of the big argument in Australia right now that Australia in the developed nations is probably not probably is has i should say, the lowest productivity growth of any nation in the world developed nations right now, What do you think AI is going to do to help productivity in a place like Australia, Well, if.
You believe the economists, all the economists come out with numbers, which is it can lift our productivity by fifteen twenty.
Percent, which is significant.
Yes, and I see a few other things coming along that can offer fifteen twenty percent lifts of our productivity.
That's good.
Yeah, that's good.
That's a good thing.
That's a good thing.
Should we embrace it? Because the flip side of that is, you know, no I read in or hear about this often, is that there's going to be some stage where no one actually goes to work anymore. No one, no one actually works anymore, No, no, no one, but lead the majority of people, their jobs are going to become redundant. But the same productivity, the same man A taxs paid, which means the govern's got the money and we just pay you to stay home.
Yep.
Well, I think.
People forget this has already happened, right, This happened with the Industrial Revolution, before the people forget the weekend was an invention of the dust Revolution. Before the indust revolution, you work seminary week some went up, some went down. You were working all that time. And then because of the productivity benefits of you know, the automation machinery that we brought in in the Dust Revolution, we got we got to say, you know, we want to share some
of that. We want Sunday off to go to church, then Saturday afternoon off, then all of Saturday. And then I don't know why we stopped asking why did we stop asking for more? I mean, what was There's nothing magic about two days off but every seven. There's nothing about you know, the earth going around the sun that says it's only two days off seven. It's a human construction, which was we could have carried on asking for more. And you know, interestingly, there are experiments on a four
day week in New Zealand and Europe. Hundreds of thousand people are doing these experiments now and the experiments all have two conclusions. One is that people do as much work in four days as they used to do in five. You you know, stop having all the bullshit meetings. You get down to it and focus on what you need to do so you can pay them as much because they're doing just as much. Right, so business is just as productive as they were when you were working five
And second, people are happy. Who would have imagined.
Well that I from wondering about though the happier I guess abby people said they're going to work. They're still enjoying their colleagues Monday to Thursday, for example, find I said it's something that they have an opportunity to enjoy their family. They're still getting paid the same amount of money because the company should be making the same amount of money, so the company can afford to pay them
the same amount of money. That will be people who will be seduced into paying you less, but it doesn't matter trying to pay you less. Do you see that in the is this some? Is this a consequence of AO? Do you see this coming out in the future that will we definitely will be working less days, because isn't that one way fixing up the fact that some people will have no job? Yes, so instead of saying you don't work any days, I'll work one less day and
you can you will work? Yeah, yeah, whatever, some along those lines. You know what I mean, like, you know, because there might be for every one person loses their job, there might be five people keep the job. So five people, I'll do it. If six people keep the job, five people keep the job, we should say so fire people going to all say we'll work one day less. You the one person have lost your job, you can now work five days or one of those lines, you know, mathematically.
So that is that something people are talking about now.
I think we should be having these conversations. I mean, I think it's an example of how we went through some big structural changes through the Industrial Revolution. We introduced, you know, the weekend unions, labor laws to protect the rights of workers, to spread the benefits around, universal education so we're educated for those new jobs, Universal welfare so that when we were unemployed we weren't in the poorhouse, Universal pensions so that we could retire at the end
of our working lives. We did a lot to you know, spread the benefits around and make sure it was good.
So the structure sort of exists.
Well, now we're going through another big change, and I think we should be thinking equally radically about this. And you know, there are deep fundamental questions here, you know, many people derive their value through what they do.
They identify with that, and then we.
Meet someone, you say, what do you do? What work do you do? Right? Device, Well, if we're in a world where work is less important, now, how are we going to define our meaning? How? What does our purpose?
So therefore a consequence of AI and a consequence of more efficiency and better productivity as a result of AI, which is one of the things I should do. Maybe government or somebody has now gone an obligation to actually help us redefine what we do. So in other words, I've only worked three days a week. That's the time I was working five days a week. That was my life. Now I'm working less than one half of my ev seven. By the way, seven days is fiction as well, But
don't worry. We just assume seven days a week is correct. But four of those seven I'm not working. So all of a sudden, I'm at home. I'm not doing anything I don't think to do. It's government's got to start to re educate us to or to encourage us to, because we don't really sitting at home doing nothing. Maybe we do, but most of we'll get jacked that pretty quick.
Yes, you're right. I mean I always say to remind people, you know, the purpose of education. When we educate people, it's not just to prepare them for work. It's to prepare them to take advantage of their lives, to be good citizens, to be able to do stuff and you know, make the world a better play.
Do you think we're how to enjoy ourselves though, Like if we're only going to work three days a week, because we identify with ourselves working five days a week. And as you say, this is going to happen quickly, so quicker than we think. We've got to learn relearn how to fill in those extra couple of days a week.
We are, but I mean, that's the great strength of humans, right, we're so quick to there we go back, cast your mind back to COVID, and we immediately learned the value of being able to come together a bit, being able to go out and you know, have a walk in the park and so on, those things that we remember. Reminded so quickly about the value of those things, and we appreciated those things so much more.
Of course, a lot of people during the COVID period became addicted to social Yeah. Do you think is there.
A very seductive, very addictive.
Is there a potential problem because that that is AI working You either be time why.
It's going to be super charged by it to be because the content is going to be our generated content, that it's going to be personalized for you. It's the AI algorithm's course that are finding your sweet spots and things.
And keep seeing you the same stuff and then testing where you want to go from there? Do you think that therefore, which is why we should.
Be concerned about the power of the people in Silicon Valley who are making decisions to yeah, let's put the beauty filters back in yeah, despite the fact that they know that we're not going to be able to resist using them, that we're all going to be Oh, I can't compare myself to these other people have got the beauty filters. Are I have to use the beauty filters myself?
Because for me, the way I see myself advancing in life is to learn more things. But to learn things they've got nothing to do with what I already know. But the whole of the time for that well, at the essence of AIS, it doesn't work that way. It's going to say no, I'm going to keep giving you what I know you like, especially if it's on a social environment. Do you think the conversation needs to be had as to how do I encourage Mark when he's only working three days a week he said a four days,
seven days, five days a week. How do I encourage Mark this conversation to or how to I encourage Mark Zuckerberg or those people control these environments to start to feed Mark something different, to encourage him to start to think more broadly or laterally about other things. What do you think about that conversation?
As I've seen the reason why we couldn't think of that algorithmically, how we couldn't actually say to the algorithms, no, actually we don't want more of the same. We want If you play my favorite song to me too many times, it's going to stop being my favorite song. I'm going to get tired of it. So play me other things. You know, I remember, you know, I used to go to the music shop and browse through the music and
find things by chance serendipity. It's fantastic for finding musicians that I would never have otherwise found, just because they happen to be next to where I wanted on the shelf.
So you know, maybe we howgroythmically can encourage serendipity. But the problem here is the perverse incentives that the incentives that the media companies the tech companies have to you know, keep you there in the short term to keep you scrolling infinite scrolling through what their content for the now, because you know, obviously they're sending your time, they're selling your adverts and everything in and now, which is good for their revenues in the short term, but bad for
you and indeed probably bad for them actually in the longer term, which is that you know, maybe they should just be saying, you know, chatter gbt'd ever says, you know, tybe, you've been asking me questions for three hours. It's three o'clock in the morning. Time to go to bed. You know, it always ends with an open question because they're trying to sell you more token.
Or three more questions. Yes, yeah, it's funny. You know. I remember in two thousand and one, excuse me. In two thousand and I got asked by the then Minister for Finance Jaie Hockey to share a task force as part of Australia's OCD obligations to build a code of Practice for consumer protection for Internet vendors. So we're twenty two thous and one. It's simple things like spam you should you you know, what's the relationship you got to have opped in opted out? Just a code of practice,
not legislation, but a code of practice. Simple things like if you know, if you go to a vendors website and if you want to buy pajamas for your kid, there should be the code of practice has said that you should disclose if the pajamas a fly noble or returns by something doesn't hit. What's my returns policies? You have to have it laid out. This is in two thousand, Well, it's not that long ago. It's not very long ago.
Australia was the first country, so we produced a paper in a document that was the first country to first over CD country that actually put out this code of practice, and we're all quite proud of ourselves. But of course a lot of that stuff's now embedded in legislation. Do you think that the world is now at a point where we either need a code of practice or or legislation because then it was directed at millions and millions
of indors. Do you think we will have the same equivalent for the twelve or fifteen powerful people who run all these AI platforms to say, dudes, this is a code of practice, or even stronger, this is the legislation, because code practice always ends up getting code of fi into law, which is what happened. Do you think this sort of thing should be done? And is there any inquiries into this stuff going on at the moment anywhere in the world.
Yeah, I mean, I think policy personal politicians are working up to that they could do something. There was certainly, I think a feeling of impotence that, you know, how can we push back against these powerful companies. They're wealthier than nations, they operate outs outside our national borders and pay tax. They're pay tax. You know, the rules don't seem to apply to them.
Yeah, well they're not people.
Why they're not people? So you know, we're just going to have to accept it. And I think now there's a growing realization and a huge pressure from the public as well to do something. And we saw the success of the social media you know, age delay laws demonstrating that we can we can protect young people from this, and there's being in the press other legislation around, you know, making it criminal to distribute new defied pictures of people, because that was becoming a problem in our schools.
As in fake fake images of faking a friend your friend and then spread around the whole school.
So yeah, I think there's we've demonstrated we can do things, and there's a real appetite now to do things. I really do feel that with the new things that we're going to be able to do with AI that werey're going to be new harms. We talked about how people are having relationships with AIS, how people are using AI the therapists, people are committing suicides, and the chat pot
is encouraging that behavior. Like, I think there's we've also seen that the tech companies themselves, Oh you know, there's perverse incentives been played for them not to do the right thing, not to worry necessary so much about our safety.
Do you think we might end up having an AI policeman? So you know, like I'm on one of the platforms and I'm doing what I'm doing, but somehow I allow or permit an II policeman to always enter into my world and say, Mark, you're going too far. You need to go to sleep outside of outside of, for example, whatever I'm using. So it's actually an artificial intelligence policeman police person that actually not policing but effectively monitors what
I'm doing. But across the board on everything I would I.
Wouldn't call it a policeman. I call it a guardian.
Okay, that's a better word.
Yeah, AI guardian. And I'm pretty convinced on your phone you're going to have an AI guardian that sits there watching what's going on and says, Mark, be careful. This looks like it's a scam advert lock. This company's trying to steal some data out of you here, and.
Well, Mark, you might be spent too much time. Yeah, and also just tells me howmuch, says hey, like actually prompts me with a notification or a nudge, because the nudging is still very powerful. Yes, I mean it, which, by the way, is what most of the platform is doing to you all the time. But it's so subtle you don't even feel the nudge. But something is a little less subtle, and.
The nudges that they're giving are noticary for your benefit.
No, no, no, they're pushing to get.
You to spend more time on the platform. Or to buy more stuff totally. Whereas you know, we want to be nudged in ways to help for us to say, like, okay, you know, make you a happier, more content rounded person.
You know, it could be nearly an education program for you too, that could sort of saying, well, the reason you need this or the reason this might be a good idea this guardian ship for adults as well as kids, is because we want to make you a happy person. We don't want you to become sort of living in this weird world where it's not real because the definition real will become brought into question. We won't know, But I think that's look for me, I reckon, that's a
great idea. I would actually I would actually allow that app to live in my world. But not not not not to wrap me out of the knuckles. But maybe if it's you know, maybe you can you can enable a lot of empowering. You say, listen. If I don't listen to you, and I continue to straighten no matter what you tell me, please advise my partner, or please advise my oldest son or daughter, or my mom or dad, or whatever the case may be, you opt into that it's not automatic you can opt in. In other words,
you're still in control. Is that it? But is that being done anywhere? Is anyone doing anything like that? Sounds like a fantastic I was just saying, we were just thinking. I think we might have just invented something. Yes, just talk about your book. So I have the These books are both the same. But this book's called the Shortest History of AI but it's obviously by you. And this is the English version of this strain version. I like this one because you signed this one. What and you've
done a number of books. You've done produced number of books, so as well as you know you speak at lots of events. You know it's particularly you know you're not a nations, which is pretty cool. But what is the shortest?
Was never in my bucket list. I never expected, never wanted. But you know, if you know, you see the harms, you think, well, if I could do something about it to I will you know. I know what my daughter's term me when she's grown up and say, Dad, you had a chance to do something.
Yeah, why didn't you?
Why didn't you?
She's your guardian. So this says six the six essential ideas that animated obviously that's AI. What do you mean by that? The six essential ideas.
So it's a short history of AI six chapters. Each chapter is is one idea that some of the magic behind art of intelligence. So one of the chapters is about neural networks and chat gipt and how how they work. Tries to explain and explains the history, where did they come from? Where did that how did that technology come? And some of the colorful characters.
Because there's a lot of let's call it jargon in AI world, neural networks, large language models, and all these sorts of things, and it's nearly like it's to me, it looks like it's designed to the average person to say, look, just accept it's too complicated for you. Just go along with it. That this nearly it is nearly a new language.
It is. But let's forget we're trying to make machines that are intelligent, and you know intelligence is you know, our brain is the most complex thing in the universe. Yep, by far. Yeah, nothing approaches the complexity, so we're trying to match that. So it's not surprising that it gets a bit technical and it does seem a bit magical
to us. And we're easily taken in when the machines start talking back to us, because no one else has ever only how the humans, but the only thing that ever talked back to us were other humans, other intelligent beings. So it's easy to be fooled and seduced by the machines when they started talking to us because our only experience of things that talk back to us are other humans, all of their intelligence and everything else that goes with being humans.
You own a book called twenty sixty two The World that AOI made. This is looking into the future.
Yes, the year twenty sixty two.
Yeah, the year twenty sixty two. So why they're year?
Well I gave a talk in North Sydney and this old lady turned up at the talk and she said, oh, so it's nothing to do with my post code. Then I'm very sorry. It's got you here on the forced protector. It's all about the year.
Twenty sixty or why twenty sixty two?
Well? I surveyed three hundred colleagues other experts around the world in AI. I asked them the simple question, when would computers match humans in their intelligence? And the average answer they said this was ten years ago. It was twenty sixty two. I think I suspect if I did the survey today, they might say twenty forty two. Oh really, yes, I think the date has moved forwards quite significantly.
And what do you mean by match our intelligence?
To do everything that we can do? That requires intelligence? And what do you mean by intelligence to be able to write a poem, do a tax return, answer a maths question? They can do this, plan a holiday.
He can do that now though, yes, why twenty forty two? What is it that do you think that a computer? Sorry, I I will that we can do that. I I can't do anything.
Well, So they don't have our creativity, they don't have our emotional intelligence, they don't have our social intelligence. There's still still a very what's called jagged intelligence. You know, there's really good at something so that they can answer international maths olympiad questions. But you know better than almost anyone on the planet. And yet you can ask them, as you know, a simple puzzle, you know, like, here's a simple one that defeats chattypt You know, I've got
a two liter jug and a five liter jug. How do I measure out three liters of liquid? And you know, the answer right, you feel the five liter jug to the top, you pour it into the two liter jug, and you've got three liters left to it. But you ask CHATTYPT and it says, it gives you this twelve step plan of pouring water backwards and fords between the jugs, and eventually it says, and now in the two liter jug,
you've got three liters of liquid. Batshit crazy. It's not deeply under earning the problem that you.
Are is that because it's taken that answer from somewhere else, or it actually deducted and.
It's been trained. There's lots of example where it puzzles on the internet where people have talked about jug questions where you pourp but it and it's sort of just giving you a blurred average of those problems where it's lots of pouring liquids backwards. And for us, it's not really sitting there thinking through logically what the steps are.
So would like as someone who's like you're a mathematicism, but as someone like you think, would you say, therefore, artificial intelligence is not really making a deduction.
Yes, it's not reasoning the way that we're reasing.
Yeah, the way we reason I should say the way we would make it deduction.
Yes, and yes, I mean we're working on how we can actually add more deductive capabilities to these language models. But they're they're you know, retrieving the answers from you know, what they were trained on more than they are reasoning about the answer.
What do you expect for twenty twenty six? That's the opposite of twenty sixty two? But like, what do you what are you looking forward to in twenty twenty six this year when it comes to artificial intelligence?
Well, I mean, the exciting thing happening now is is that we have these AI agents that instead of having these chatbots which sit there and wait for you to ask a question, they actually have some agencies, some ability to go and do stuff. So, as an example, when you've got a new employee, there's a bunch of stuff you've got to do. You've got to give you know, you've got to give them a log in, You've got to they've got to do the health and safety on
board training. They've got to get a path for the building, they've you know, they've got to you've got to get their financial data so you can pay their pay their wages at the end of the first week, there's a
bunch of you know, tasks you've got to do. Well. Now, instead of you having to go through and do all those things yourself, you can just tay to the agent, okay, can you on board this new person, and it breaks the task down into the different things, and then it takes each of those tasks and break those down into the things you have to do. To get the people's financial information, you've got to get some you know, identity documents, you've got to get their bank co ordinance. You've got
to just to them in the accountancy system. You've got to set up the payroll. And then it said, you know, to register the payroll. It's got to get you know, all the information their date of birth, the tax number and so on, and it goes through all those things. It does all that stuff for you.
And do you see for the twenty twenty six so I mean you just see just more efficiency games or do you see something large coming out of all it's something really disruptive.
Well, the disruptive thing that you have there is suddenly that the computers are doing stuff. They're changing your files there, maybe spending money, maybe the ordering stuff and that's going to go wrong.
Sometimes that will be disruptive.
That's going to be disrupted, and it's like, who are we going to blame because we can't blame the computer, but what will do? Also, things will go wrong at speed because this is a computer speed, not human speed.
So if it's trying to reverse, it could be hard to reverse.
I mean, there was a story in the paper yesterday where the head of safety at open AI had all email was deleted by one of these agents. She's the head of safety, like a rookie mistake. She gave it the power to clean up her mailbox. You know, I'd love to have someone who could go through my mailbox and clean out all the junk, but also include out all the stuff that she wanted to keep.
Because the AI agent had agency and made the decisions.
Yes, made the decisions.
So that that means the instructions and the rules that have been given to the AAI agent were not not complete or maybe not accurately.
It wasn't just that the rules were in complete, but also the AI is not perfect. You know, we talked about how they hallucinate, They make mistakes, you know, just like humans are not perfect. These are not perfect either.
So we be, and I guess that's sort of part of it too. I think we should learn to expect imperfection.
They are, we should, But I mean, the interesting thing is people have higher standards for machines than they'd have to have.
That's weird.
So you say to people, you know, we've got self driving cars now, and they're roughly the level of humans in terms of, you know, the number of mistakes they make, and some ways they're better than humans they make fewer mistakes, but people are still very reluctant to give them responsibility to drive. So you say, well, okay, well how much better than humans? If they do, they have to be ten times better than humans before we can entrust them
with the responsibility of driving without human oversight. And then at some point, you know, okay, so maybe we say it's ten Well, what happens when they're a hundred times better than humans? Do we let humans still drive? Because humans are going to be killing people. Machines are provably not going to be killed. They can't get drunk. They can't get drunk, they're going to be tired, they overtired. Yeah, they're not going to be speeding, They're not going to
be breaking the road rules. At what point do we say, humans, you know you're killing you know, your fellow citizens, maybe we shouldn't allow this.
Well, a friend of mine the other day told me that Tom she was in San Francisco and the incinet went down, stopped and they all stopped, which is the stop stop there and then, which is the safe thing to do totally. But there were other non waymos on the road. Yes, humans people driving cars. I'm now called to non non and you're driving and and like I all of a sudden the things because literally they're just yeah, they're not used, they're not going very fast because they're
all governed. But nonetheless they just stopped because something happened in obviously and yeah, and we keep forgetting that. The the Achilles heel of all artificial intelligence is that is power. Yes,
I mean that's what drives everything. If you turn off the switch, not literally, if you know what I mean metaphorically, if you just turn the power off this thing that we're really worried about, or somehow you can if the thing is battery based, like it's some other way it's powered, not not by electricity with something, not by put money in a wall. If somebody you can disconnect the power thing stops, it does.
But that's the problem as well. I am forced to write this fantastic science fiction story one hundred years ago titled When the Machine Stops, about how wig becoming ever more dependent upon the machines and the machines are becoming ever more when we're losing touch with actually how they work. And the short story is about what happens, you know, when the machines eventually stop break, no one knows how to fix them, and the world grinds to a halt.
Yeah.
So it's not that you know that we turn the machines off. It's problems. But when the machine stops, what happens? Could we still do anything? And we're already completely dependent. If the Internet goes down, the stock market stops, the air traffic you know, you know in the university, you know, the internet goes down, people say, well, time to go home.
I think we can do yeah go home? Yeah, Well I'm wishing.
And now even that is problematic because lots of people have got smart doorbells and so on, and they can't get into their homes anymore.
Yeah, because it's either thing of printer or some sort of biometric you can't get out. We were in an old fashion key hidden somewhere exactly somewhere, and that's your redundancy process.
My wife was saying, should we get some of those smart doorbells and things. I said, no, keys are fantastic.
They work totally the redundancy and you can have and you can have a second key. If you lose that key, you can have another key hidden somewhere, which is what most people do. I really appreciate this conversation. I've had a lot of fun talking to you about it, but equally on the funds off on the other side of
fund is a serious topic. Yeah, a very serious topic topic, and I wish you the best when you go to the United Nations next week and hopefully, you know, we can start to get some better road rules around or get the conversation going about what the road rules are for the future. Indeed, thank you very much.
Been a pleasure by