00:00more now around the debate surrounding ai safety and safeguards president trump dismissing industry
00:05calls for a slowdown as part of a quote conspiracy theory china also calling fresh warnings about the
00:11tech fear-mongering it comes as the sector considers establishing common safety standards
00:15microsoft has now released an ai manifesto that it says puts people first after the ceos at
00:21anthropic open ai and spacex ai endorsed voluntarily slowing ai advancement let's get some more with
00:28toby walsh is the assentia professor of artificial intelligence at the university of new south wales
00:34here in sydney really great to have you with us and it comes on a day that we heard from
00:38uh australian
00:39leader the signals director at director general saying that we need an early warning system for ai
00:45here i guess my question to you is is multifold do you think safeguards need to be put in place
00:50is it a little bit late in terms of the progress that's already been forged ahead with and and who
00:56should be putting in these safeguards given the difficulty i think regulators have of understanding
01:01and keeping up with the tech well it's very improbable that ai's going to kill us all but ai's
01:09starting to have the capability to do some serious on particular things like the cyber risk there was
01:14actually a very troubling report from anthropic last week showing that iranians are trying to do
01:20bio weapon research using the claw chatbot and russian hackers had tried to build some autonomous
01:27swarms of kamikaze drones uh those are things that we started to be worried about and as the chief of
01:33azia says um it really is something that we need some warnings about at the same time of course he
01:39also
01:39said it's really improving lifting their game as well
01:45for australia what steps should be taken because
01:48this is happening at the same time when you have really both sides of government trying to work out
01:52how broadly the economy can take advantage of the ai opportunity right whether it be the build out of
01:59data centers whether it be taking up the opportunities that we've heard from some of the ai giants of
02:04training models in australia
02:08yeah i mean it is actually keeping our economy afloat at the moment the latest abs corgi figures
02:13uh said that if it weren't for the spend on building ai data centers and the like we would
02:19have gone into recession so the government's obviously uh rightly very keen to ensure that we do get
02:24the benefits we do that get the growth but at the same time uh we also need to think about
02:28some of the
02:29risks especially the longer term risks uh and those are those are not just national issues though i mean
02:34this is ai is an international race we've got to work out how we coordinate um how the us and
02:40china
02:40actually manage these risks as well and it's a bit troubling that trump is dismissing the risk
02:45completely i like that in your notes you're saying the good news is i very much doubt we're all going
02:52to die because of rogue ai i mean that's a pretty low baseline right we could see some pretty seismic
02:57impact when it comes to the economy when it comes to financial systems when it comes to the social fabric
03:04do you worry about these issues and i i guess a concern is who's in the right place to be
03:10deciding
03:10what the guardrails and limitations should be at any given time
03:16yeah very much so i'm actually much more worried about some of the longer term more insidious risk
03:21the risk is going to have on people's employment is it going to create an underclass of people who are
03:26put out of work you know what's the impact it's going to have on our political discourse we've already
03:30seen what social media did to that it polarized us and and and turned uh politics into a mudfest but
03:38uh and what it's going to have to our relationships we increasingly people are starting to have
03:42relationships synthetic relationships with bots 200 000 teenagers in australia have had an ai boyfriend
03:49or an ai girlfriend i worry what the impact that's going to have um on us as humans in the
03:55long term so
03:55there's a there's a lot to worry about and there's a lot that our government should be doing in terms
04:00of
04:00protecting its citizens as well as seizing the economic possibilities
04:06do you think it's particularly worrying that we're now hearing from the top leaders of these ai
04:11companies it's not just whistleblowers right it's not just gross grassroots activists that are now
04:15concerned when you hear from the likes of the heads of anthropic of open ai from elon musk does that
04:22really suggest that there is an existential threat here that they would want to slow the pace of
04:27development i definitely suggest we should be thinking about slowing the pace of development
04:35elon musk sam altman dario modi the heads of these ai companies hate each other they agree on almost
04:41nothing so the fact that they can agree on this is actually quite telling um and so i think we
04:47should i
04:47mean it's it's probably been it's a little late in the day for them still to be marking their own
04:52homework they've actually asked uh suggested that we should have independent government oversight orders
04:57auditing what's going on in labs we do that with drug companies we do that with aviation companies uh
05:03we do that in in any other business where where there is significant risk to human life ai is starting
05:08to be a business in which there's significant risks possibly to human life i think there needs to be
05:13better oversight we can't rely on their goodwill i love the uh marking your own homework um comparison
05:22toby you know do you think the expertise is there in the public sector in terms of independent
05:27regulators that's a great question because you're right um we're talking about pretty capable competent
05:37people who can command very large salaries in the private sector so it's going to be hard for
05:43government to do that though they've already got a lead i mean most uk government the united states
05:47government here in australia we've set up these ai safety centers um there's the significant
05:52expertise they maybe need some more resources um and they may probably need some more law to
05:57to add teeth to what they do but the governments have started to move down the right road
06:03it's quite interesting for all of the feuding uh and of course we're expecting ai discussions to
06:10take place when presidents here and trump meet a little bit later both seem to be on the same
06:15track when it comes to dismissing these concerns as fear-mongering president trump in his uh social
06:20media um statement saying it it's a hoax he thinks it's a conspiracy right this idea that it needs to
06:26be
06:26slowed down if the two biggest economies and two biggest tech ecosystems in the world are going down
06:32that track what should middle countries like australia be aiming for do you think there's value in a
06:39coalition of of smaller countries that might want to reach some degree of of you know conservative
06:45guardrails for for artificial intelligence uh 100 percent i'm i'm backing uh people like mark
06:54uh this is completely correct middle powers like um canada the australia and and large powers like
07:02europe uh can really set the agenda here it's really important that we work together with those
07:08middle powers with with europe um we're actually you know europe plus canada plus australia um is
07:14actually a larger economic zone uh than the united states or china on their own so so uh we've got
07:21a
07:21significant role to play and we should realize that together we can actually really set the norms
07:26and standards for the rest of the world to be really great to have you with us toby walsh
07:31science professor of artificial intelligence at unsw sydney we have more on australia head
07:36every tuesday at 10 40 a.m if you're watching in sydney 8 40 a.m if you're catching us
07:40in hong kong
07:41you can also tune into the bloomberg australia podcast delving into the biggest stories shaping
07:46the country's role in global business you can find that on apple spotify or bloomberg.com
07:50more ahead here on the asia trade this is bloomberg
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