Sure.
So far we're seeing a bunch of early warning signs, everything from chatbots talking teenagers into suicide or job impacts on the youth or record levels of scams and AI-powered cyber-attacks. These are important and need to be dealt with, but they're not in themselves a justification for whole-of-government action. Why they matter is where they're headed. Right now we have teenager AI: very simple systems, or relatively simple systems, I should say. What all the leading AI labs are actively building.... Particularly if you go to their websites, they're saying that they are building smarter-than-human AI systems. According to their CEOs and according to a lot of experts, including the engineers who left these organizations as whistle-blowers because they don't trust them, also say that yes, in two to five years, smarter-than-human AI is possible.
The reason governments need to act currently and be proactive is really the fact that we may not have much time to prepare for the much bigger risks to come. Given that it will require global solutions, and global solutions take forever to put in place even if we have 20 years, we're in a race against time.
On the point of hope and fear, I fully agree we can't.... I'm doing what I'm doing because I believe there are still solutions and because I think there are positive ways forward. We can't let fear paralyze us, and we can't tell ourselves that AI is no good at all, because there are a lot of really good applications of AI, in health care, in energy, in all that kind of stuff. I think it's very important to be neither enthusiastic nor pessimistic about AI and just be very clear-eyed about what's coming and how we can prepare.