Ben Buchanan
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ben Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think we are going to see extraordinarily capable AI systems. I don't love the term artificial general intelligence, but I think that will fit in the next couple of years, quite likely during Donald Trump's presidency. And I think there's a view that this has always been something of corporate hype or speculation.
And I think one of the things I saw in the White House when I was decidedly not in a corporate position was trend lines that looked very clear. And what we tried to do under the president's leadership was get the U.S. government and our society ready for these systems.
The sort of canonical definition of AGI, which again is a term I don't love, is a system... It'll be good if every time you say AGI, you caveat that you dislike the term. It'll sink in, right?
I'm trying to get it in the training data. A canonical definition of AGI is a system capable of doing almost any cognitive task a human can do.
I don't know that we'll quite see that in the next four years or so, but I do think we'll see something like that, where the breadth of the system is remarkable, but also its depth, its capacity to, in some cases, exceed human capabilities, kind of regardless of the cognitive discipline. Systems that can replace human beings in cognitively demanding jobs.
I think that's right. I'm not a labor market economist, but I think that the systems are extraordinarily capable. In some ways, I'm very fond of the quote, the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed. And I think unless you are engaging with this technology, you probably don't appreciate how good it is today.
And then it's important to recognize today is the worst it's ever going to be. It's only going to get better. And I think that is the dynamic that in the White House world, We were tracking and that the next White House and our country as a whole is going to have to track and adapt to in really short order.
And what's fascinating to me is that this is the first revolutionary technology that is not funded by the Department of Defense, basically. And if you go back historically, last 100 years or so, nukes, space, early days of the internet, early days of the microprocessor, early days of large-scale aviation, radar, GPS, the list is very, very long.
All of that tech is fundamentally comes from DoD money. And it's the private sector inventing it, to be sure. But the central government role is... gave the Department of Defense and the U.S. government an understanding of the technology that by default, it does not have an AI, and also gave the U.S. government a capacity to shape where that technology goes, that by default, we don't have an AI.
I do think there are profound economic and military and intelligence capabilities that would be downstream of getting to AGI or transformative AI. And I do think it is fundamental for U.S. national security that we continue to lead AI. I think the quote that certainly I thought about a fair amount was actually from Kennedy in his famous Rice speech in 62, the we're going to the moon speech.
Aaron remembers it because he's saying we're going to the moon, but actually I think he gives the better line when he talks about the importance of space.
And I think that is true in AI, that there's a lot of tremendous uncertainty about this technology. I am not an AI evangelist. I think there's huge risks to this technology. But I do think there is a fundamental role for the United States in being able to shape where it goes. Which is not to say we don't want to work internationally, which is not to say we don't want to work with the Chinese.
It's worth noting that in the president's executive order on AI, there's a line in there saying we are willing to work even with our competitors on AI safety and the like. But it is worth saying that I think pretty deeply there is a fundamental role for America here that we cannot abdicate.
So I think let's look at just a narrow case of AI for intelligence analysis and cyber operations. This is, I think, pretty out in the open that if you had a much more powerful AI capability, that would probably enable you to do better cyber operations on offense and on defense. What is a cyber operation?
Breaking into an adversary's network to collect information, which if you're collecting a large enough volume, AI systems can help you analyze. And we actually did a whole big thing through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, called the AI Cyber Challenge, to test out AI's capabilities to do this.
And I would not want to live in a world in which China has that capability on offense and defense and cyber, and the United States does not. And I think that is true in a bunch of different domains that are core to national security competition.
What we mean canonically when we speak of hacking is finding vulnerability in software, exploiting that vulnerability to get illicit access. And I think it is right that more powerful AI systems will make it easier to find vulnerabilities and exploit them and gain access. And that will yield an advantage to the offensive side of the ball.
I think it is also the case that more powerful AI systems on the defensive side will make it easier to write more secure code in the first place, reduce number of vulnerabilities that can be found, and to better detect the hackers that are coming in. And I think we tried as much as possible to shift the balance towards the defensive side of this.
But I think it is right that in the coming years here, this sort of transition period we've been talking about, that there will be a period in which sort of older legacy systems that don't have the advantage of the newest AI defensive techniques or software development techniques will on balance be more vulnerable to a more capable offensive actor. Which is what most people use.
I don't know if that's right, actually. I mean, you have an iPhone in your pocket that, or Google Pixel. People are often not that quick about updating. Yeah. I mean, the less tech literate you are, the more vulnerable you can be to this.
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