Does it all really need to be doom and gloom around AI?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. AI, is it bringing us closer to a doomsday scenario? We have the AI hack into the Australian government's website over the last 24 hours. That raised further eyebrows about the tech. And it's the latest episode that seems to give us a warning about the threat of AI. We're getting very many of them in recent times. Elaine Burke is here from For Tech's Sake podcast. Hello, Elaine.
What is the Australian government website hack and why does it spark AI doom talk?
Hi, how
are you doing?
Doomsday, it's going to kill us. It's going to eat our lunch. We won't have any jobs. Are you buying
it? I'm way more scared about the recent IPCC report about our climate change goals being absolutely scundered at this point. I think that's the thing that we're going to be most directly impacted by in the scarily near future, to be totally honest. And the build out of computing power to support AI contributes to that and makes that worse.
The former head of public affairs at Meta, Nick Clegg, former Lib Dem guy, he did an interview yesterday and he said he dismissed the fears around AI as well. He said the tech bosses are breathing their own fumes.
That's funny, actually. I described it on my own podcast as smelling their own farts. So this is just the more polite version of it.
But talk to me about that. What is the benefit of them talking up the doomsday scenario here, if you own an
AI
company?
So there's a couple of things going on here. So what you've seen mostly is that they aren't so much talking up the doom, they are just talking up the regulate me daddy approach. They're just like, oh, can you just regulate us and then everything will be fine, even though they have the power to stop should they wish to. But what would happen is, I can't categorically say what any of them believe here, but I can tell you that if you slow down and regulate AI development, it's going to affect the companies that are chasing them. it's going to affect things like open source AI development, which they are struggling to contend with because they're trying to build products that they can sell to people.
And there's an open source market opening up that is quite competitive and that people are able to more freely access. So you're suggesting it might be that they're
worried about the companies that are chasing their tail.
And they are trying to IPO. So they're trying to enter the stock market in this environment and they can't enter the stock market with that kind of competition and get the kind of valuation that they want out of it. So that's one thing that I can tell you for sure that that's a good reason if you're business minded to ask for this kind of slowdown. And I would imagine that is quite a significant motivation. There's also then a side of this where you've had, you know, people like Jacob Coxon, who really, really publicly resigned his post from Anthropic. He also used to work in OpenAI.
How does the recent IPCC climate report compare to AI‑related fears?
He used to work in model development. And he's a young engineer working at these companies. He's been speaking a lot about his fears of this existential risks that AI presents. And he says he's heard talk of that even among senior people in the companies that he's worked in. And I do also believe that that's something that's happening. That's a culture that they're embedded in. And I do believe that some of these people are genuinely scared of what they're developing. But this is actually a known issue in the community. So this goes back to the very, very early days of a development of artificial intelligence, which goes back to the 50s and 60s. And the very, very first chatbot that was ever developed was called Eliza.
And people using Eliza, even though it was a very rudimentary machine that would give these rote answers, but it was supposed to emanate like a psychologist. People were ascribing human attributes to Eliza even then and getting a bit wigged out about how they thought it actually had a bit of sentience and humanity. Even when it was explained to them how Eliza worked and even when they knew how it worked, they were still getting that sense.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:30
2
What is the Australian government website hack and why does it spark AI doom talk?
0:30–2:39
3
How does the recent IPCC climate report compare to AI‑related fears?
2:39–6:22
4
Why do AI companies promote a ‘regulate‑me‑please’ narrative?
6:22–8:40