00:00You can get it. Well, Neil Lawrence is a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge.
00:05Thank you very much for joining me today. Trump's AI push. Let's talk a little bit more about this.
00:10It involves deregulation. It involves 90 billion dollars in investments.
00:16Is this a game changer, do you think, for the whole industry or is this just a sense of political theater?
00:22Well, I suppose it could be both. I think one of the challenges with the conversation around AI is it's becoming increasingly detached from the reality of what regular citizens and customers are experiencing and becoming a very large money investment game.
00:40So in that environment, political theater can be a game changer, whether it will be a game changer in terms of addressing the needs of citizens around the world, I think is a separate question.
00:52We're looking now at favoring export friendly policy when it comes to AI, aren't we?
00:59How do you think that could reshape global competition, say, for instance, with China or with the EU?
01:07I think it's tricky because when we look at the situation in the United States where a large amount of the economy now is dependent on these large tech companies that are having a large say in the creation and deployment of these technologies.
01:21Let me be very clear, they were not the originators in many cases of these ideas, but they are certainly the deployers.
01:29That puts the whole world in a difficult position, including the U.S. government, because what we're talking about is a technology that is going to dominate information channels for the next foreseeable future.
01:43That is in the hands of private companies where there is very little regulation.
01:47So how that pans out is going to differ depending on whether you're a sort of, as we say in the U.K., an AI maker or an AI taker.
01:56But the U.S. is certainly an AI maker and most of the rest of the world outside China is an AI taker at the moment.
02:03Looking at these huge bonuses, 200 million dollars just to sign up to do this work.
02:09What do you think this means and what do you think it will mean for competition and for talent going forward?
02:18Well, it's clearly an absurdity.
02:20I mean, we are not talking generational talents like Lionel Messi being paid these amounts of money.
02:25This is a fight between these large tech companies for perception of what they believe the AI future will be,
02:32which is, as I say, increasingly disconnected from their customers and citizens of the countries which we're hoping this technology serves.
02:39But when you get a fight like that and you've got sort of very few tech CEOs arguing about what that future is
02:46and in some sense competing over a sort of phantasm that they agree about, you can get these sort of unusual effects.
02:54Because there is definitely a shortage of such talent.
02:57But what we would prefer these companies were doing was supporting the addressing of that shortage
03:02and supporting the very difficult work that universities now face in creating a generation of people that can address these works.
03:09And, you know, universities being the origin of these innovations in the first place.
03:13And I think it represents a significant distortion of how some of our societies are working,
03:18that we should be talking about such salaries as a credible idea.
03:22Indeed, it demonstrates somewhat something dystopian about what these companies view this technology as.
03:30I think we need to get something much more serious about the technology that is addressing the needs of regular citizens
03:35and is usable and steerable by those citizens.
03:40Neil Lawrence from the University of Cambridge. Thank you very much indeed.
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