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[Music] Hello and welcome back to TechTV. Today we’re going to be talking about a whole host of issues. Um, and I’m joined today by um, two of my uh, closest colleagues. Um, here in the studio we have Pete Warren and joining us from Australia we have Dez Blanchfield. Pete Dez, great to see you. Uh Pete, what are we talking about here today? >> Well, we’re gonna talk about online safety bill. A subject very very close to your my heart and I’m sure TZ is too because the UK has introduced the online
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safety bill. And um uh essentially what’s happened is there’s been this sudden stampede by we wonder who uh to get um virtual p private networks so that they can evade the age verification or one assumes that is the reason we don’t really know but um VPNs have taken off like there is no tomorrow which is quite interesting in itself because there are other reasons to have VPNs but you as I’m sure we will hear from everybody, let’s go for it. Is it a good way to do online safety?
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Well, Jez, I believe that there’s been a different approach in Australia and we might want to start by just examining how the Australians have approached this and then come back and look at what the UK has done differently because I think that there’s a lot that we could or should have learned from Australia. There is indeed and I think it comes to the point we were talking about earlier off air and that is that Australia is often a very early adopter of technology. If you go back to sort of
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pre- internet times with the faximile machine when you look at the rapid adoption of the internet technologies themselves all kind you know online banking digital banking internet banking web banking etc. We’ve been a very early adopter of technologies in general. We’ve had digital uh IDs for a long time. We’ve had digital driver’s licenses for a long time. We actually have a thing called my gov. And my gov is a platform where everybody essentially has an identification online. And it’s used for everything
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health, driver’s licenses, you name it. And it’s had a wellestablished, very successful history of providing very safe, secure integration between all of our government services. And I think it’s about to be tested in many ways. um in the same way that the United Kingdom is about to be tested in that is going to be part of the integration of this whole age verification challenge and that is that you know how do we keep kids under a certain age away from potential harm online and I think that’s
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really the crux of what we’re talking about here a lot of people think that we’re giving up liberties um and there’s a bunch of debate about as to whether mom and dad should be doing it or whether uh you know kids should be able to police themselves but the reality is that the internet that we grew up with uh and then many ways we helped bring on board and invent that doesn’t exist anymore. Um it is a very different world. We not only have predators online, we have AI bots that are
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engaging in in wholesale crime, ID uh uh theft and so forth. So the question being asked now um with regard to the adoption of it is, you know, what is the best way? What is the right way? What is the correct way versus should we do it or should we not? I think we’re well past that question of should we do it. uh we’re now at the point of you know how do we do it and I think Australia is taking a fairly gentle approach with regard integrating into existing trusted uh mygov uh systems that we are
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comfortable with for other things such as our health records and our driver’s licenses and other digital IDs. >> So the the Australian approach in in essence is an approach in which they’ve made everyone uh prove their identity. So that’s taken away anonymity, but essentially that anonymity is preserved um to to a large extent because you’ve uh proven your identity to in private. Um this is only exposed if you start acting badly. If you’re trolling, if you’re uh doing abusive behavior, then
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they know who you are and they can track you down and they can do things. And if you need to verify your age to get onto a platform, uh if you’re a youngster at the age of 11 who’s pretending he’s 13 and to get on social media, there can be a level of age gating. The British approach is very different. It just it’s fairly binary. It’s whether you’re 18 or not, and you can prove uh that you’re an adult and therefore you can face adult content. And largely the the largest
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impact has been porn so far. Um Pete, what do you make of the differences in these two approaches? Well, I I actually think it’s quite amusing because I think it’s very much as Dez says, there’s a lack of familiarity. I mean, as Dez was talking, you suddenly reminded me of the flying doctor service. Australia is a huge place and it’s got all of the the these big empty spaces and for them technology is essential. So to adopt it and to use it very very quickly basically means that um Australia’s view technology as
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an enabler to actually bring it up to speed in lots and lots of different ways and that that’s just proved that that that they can do it because it’s it’s very pragmatic. I mean the English approach is very very stuffy. It’s it’s very similar to oh you’ve come into a pub. I don’t think you’re 18. it and it shows this this just really quite um sad uh response or relationship to technology where they don’t really understand it. I mean what but though in fairness and as De says this is a debate
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that we’ve got to have and I’ve I’ve talked about this ever such a lot as I’m sure both of you have and it is that okay I walk along the street people don’t necessarily know who I am but I’m there I’m there can be an awareness of me if I start ranting and raving and saying racist things or trying to uh say unpleasant sexual comments to people then it becomes more more necessary to for my uh identity to be revealed because my behavior is is unacceptable. >> And I think that that’s the sort of
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thing what we’re seeing is this blending of the real world into this multiversal world for one of a better expression. >> But the the problem is what are we seeking to do here? What what is the harm that we’re trying to prevent? Are we seeking to sort of provide protection from adults content and and that may be one thing that we want to do and that’s how the the British approach to age verification over 18 is set up or are we actually looking at um age appropriate content at all levels uh doing away with
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anonymity and cyber bullying and everything like that in which case the Australian approach is actually far more sensible and I would argue that we don’t let children drink or uh drive or um uh uh smoke uh until they reach a certain age. Uh and and it very much we we we’ve got a nominal age of 13 before you can get on social media. Uh but that’s there’s no way of enforcing it because there’s no age verification certainly under the scheme in the UK and in other countries where there’s no scheme at
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all. It is possible under the Australian scheme to enforce that. In fact, you could have different levels of age gating where there were 13 year olds between the age of let’s say 13 and 16. you were given a certain level of access to content from 16 to 18 a different level of access and above 18 you can sort of go for for gold. Um this seems a much more sensible approach. Des how do you see things working out in Australia? >> Well I think we’ve also glossed over the reason this is being brought about in
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the first place as well. If I can just circle back. This is not something that the Australian government and I don’t think the UK government for the most part either is actually doing by choice. The Australian government does not want to actually do this. They have no interest in doing it. It’s an expensive thing. It’s not going to get them a lot of votes. It’s not something that the population is is eager to have. The reason we’re having to do this is we can no longer trust the platforms and the
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companies who are providing those platforms with the safety of not just our kids, but people in general. And I think this is something that gets glossed over a lot. people are screaming and yelling about losing their supposed privacy and so forth when really the at the end of the day 90% of your time online is logged into social media or it’s logged into your browser is logged into a platform we generally know who and where you are but I think the key thing for me here guys is we are having
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to do this because we cannot trust the companies that are running the platforms and I’m going to name a few we you know the Googles the Facebooks the PayPal’s the ebays uh Twitter you even the LinkedIn all of of these companies have had major data breaches in some cases two or three. They have lost our private data. They have had their platforms breached. There have been predatory action on there and they cannot control the content on there. I mean, some of these companies have up to 4,000 humans
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curating the content who have to watch hours and hours of content of beheadings and and rapes and beastiality and all kinds of stuff. They cannot control themselves. So, we are now having to take this action because of that. And I think this is the really important thing that needs to be discussed that we’re not actually trying to take liberties away from people and particularly young kids. We’re simply having to provide guardrails. And to me, this is like putting speed limits on the road so that
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people have a guideline of the speed limit to drive at that’s safe. This is putting guardrails on the side of the road. If you have a slippery day where you drive in the rain and you crash, at least you’re not going out of cliff. And I think this is something we need to come back to and that is that no government really wants to go through the drama and the cost and the issues and the sagas that go with us. They don’t want to lose the votes. We are having to do this in Australia in particular because we can no longer
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trust these platforms. And I say that on the basis that as of today Apple and Google in particular have lost federal cases in the Australian federal court with regard to major issues around uh control of their platforms and monopolistic behavior. So removing apps and controlling apps and gating. So the Australian government has just taken federal action against both Apple and Google with regard to their behavior online. So if we cannot trust them behave to behave well on their own platforms just with simple things like
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putting apps in their stores, then I think it’s pretty obvious that we are doing this because we cannot trust these platforms to protect people in general and those people that are most sensitive and particularly young kids. Obviously issue of trust there and I’m going to come back to this because I think this is a topic that’s going to run and run and run and and one of the areas that’s going to complicate things is the area of AI and um we’re facing um a whole host of other issues that are
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that are coming down the pipe to haunt us. Um one of these is um the fact that people are saying that potentially there’s an AI bubble. Pete, what are your thoughts here? >> Well, I think there definitely is an AI bubble. It’s really interesting. I’m sure you two will be able to sort of have some memories of this too, but this reminds me so much of the internet boom. Um, except the other day when I was thinking about this, I was thinking, hang on, there is a difference because
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one of the things about the internet boom was sure there was a lot of noise going on, but the thing did by and large work with AI. What we’re seeing all of the time are these examples that keep on coming up that people keep on saying of hallucinations of data being in the wrong places etc etc etc. It is not finished and yet you have these vested interests and you know it strikes me that there’s a lot of Middle Eastern money that is actually going around looking for unicorns and there’s a good reason for that. the the
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the the Middle East sees technology as a potential replacement for its oil revenues. That’s why Saudi Arabia wants to build this huge city in the desert next to Jordan. It’s also why the UAE are looking to actually bring people in. So there is a very big pumping of this um this AI uh well genie uh or or or dream at the moment that’s going on as far as I’m concerned. And I think to actually just refer back to the conversation we were just having about um online safety as Dez says, if you
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can’t trust the platforms that are there already that are actually currently existing, who on earth are you going to be able to trust if you’re in this environment where people are pushing a technology at you that doesn’t quite work? And if regulation already is is sort of not quite there, if the guardrails aren’t aren’t quite there, it strikes me that we’re on a fair ground ride and um it’s uh there is no safety at all. >> But we’re going from chat GPT4 to five
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and whatever and the large language models that are being used at the moment are purely consecutive iterations of a similar model. um and all of the hallucination and all of the uh uh bad data is is being baked in. Um Dez, what is the risk here if we continue down this path? So, we’ve got a couple of really good examples of late where we’ve seen language models essentially collapse as as it’s described. What this means is that as we attempt to scale them larger and larger and larger, as we feed them
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more and more data, uh, and we increase the number of tokens that we’re expecting to push through these things, at some point they actually start returning garbage. And that’s happened to a number of companies now, very, very large brands that I won’t mention in case they sue me. But if you think of the biggest brands out there, they’ve they’ve been pushing and pushing really hard to get these massive massive language models, you know, and the concept of a large language model now is
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not really relevant because when we talked about language models and then large language models, we were talking about billions of tokens and then tens of billions. Now, now it’s it’s off the RTOR scale. The issue we’ve got is kind of it’s it’s like the the oraoris. And if people aren’t familiar with the concept of what an oraorus is in in Northern Europe, an oraorus is a dragon that eats its own tail and the rest of the world’s a snake that eats its own tail. The idea is if you imagine a snake
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in a circle and it’s eating its own tail, eventually it destroys itself. We’ve had these versions, let’s say, from 2023 when sort of the open AI offering came out that had the record uptake of 110 million uh subscribers in in a matter of days. um over the iterations sort of 1 2 3 four variations or versions of their language models we haven’t se seen a linear or exponential increase in capability or intelligence we’ve actually seen the opposite as they get to third fourth and fifth iterations
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now they actually start to implode they they collapse um but what we’ve got is another problem here with regard to the risk question you just tabled uh Bill and that is that um if we just focus on the the actual platforms and the infrastructure themselves uh it’s taking a lot more money uh uh as we go through the iterations to scale them. There’s a lot more math to be done. We need a lot more data and for the most part the general data that was fed into the first few revisions was stolen. It was scraped
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off the internet. Uh in many cases, companies are now being taken to task for either illegally scraping sites. There was a story the other day. It came about with perplexity. I think Cloudflare published something that they’re having to put tools in place now to stop these AI crawlers from scraping people’s websites illegally. uh in the same way we do with the robots.ext file saying that you can or cannot scrape my content on my website or my blogs. Uh Perplexity is being caught moving IP
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addresses as rapidly as they can to avoid the Cloudflare firewalling basically so they can continue to illegally scrape content. Uh now Perplexity is a unique one because it’s essentially a search engine powered by generative AI. Uh but when you look at the likes of Facebook who who were caught uh feeding massive illegal collections of books into that platform, you know that they are just doing an Uber. They are running flat out breaking the law as fast as they can to scale and make money. But when we go back to the
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risk that that is at play here, we have a situation where these platforms not only hallucinate as Peter said, but um there’s there’s this implicit trust being placed on them. And I actually had an interesting conversation about this recently at at a click event in Orlando. And the question I tabled was, when we talk to these generative AIs, we’re talking to them in plain English. We’re being very friendly with them. Uh, and the more friendly you are with your generative AI, the the the better the
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results are, but there’s this question with regard to the risk of what’s coming out of these AI tools and the the the the GPTs, the pre-formed uh pre-trained transformers. And that is that are we asking the questions in such a way that we’re social engineering a result we want or are these platforms actually giving us the data we need. There’s a really big difference here and that is that if we’re very friendly and kind and easy going on the GPT, it will often try and appease us and give us data that it
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thinks we actually want, which may or may not be the data that we actually need. And and this becomes quite critical when you’re putting into business systems and tools and other things. Uh so I’ll come back to that later, but I’m keen to get your thoughts on this. But I think there’s a significant risk in that the quality of the output is diminishing over time. The scaling of over time is is diminishing and uh we’re at the point now where there’s some very hard questions being
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asked with regard to where the original data they were trained on came from and you know who who if anyone is checking the results that come out of these systems. >> So Pete, where are the economics going here? I mean we’re talking about more and more investments and you mentioned the Saudis. We’re talking about iterations that aren’t actually improving the service a great deal. And we’re talking about what Dez describes as a level of piracy in terms of the data. Um, uh, who’s regulating it?
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What’s the economic model? And and is it really a bubble? >> Well, I think it’s definitely a bubble and and I think it’s a bubble because I think um Putin said it and this is one thing that I suppose I might believe for Mr. Putin. uh he said that whoever wins the AI race wins the world forever. Um and so the stakes are enormous. So in terms of the of everybody committing to the piracy you’ve just talked about. Yeah. I mean, it’s also interesting, isn’t it, to refer that back through
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again to the conversation we were having earlier about online harms because the people that we’re hoping are going to regulate this, but essentially the the big tech, those those people, they’re the ones that we’re saying, “Please, please be good about this.” They’re the ones who are, as Dez says, they’re behaving like pirates, and we’re expecting them to look after us in terms of of online harms. I mean it strikes me that there needs to be something that drives ethics in this government. Is
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that going to be capable of doing it? I mean you look at what’s going on at the Alan Cheuring Institutes in the moment which seems to be going into a tail spin because of uh some internal row that’s going on. That doesn’t exactly leave what’s meant to be the advisory group in the UK looking very good. I think the whole thing currently is a complete mess. So in terms of you saying who’s going to regulate it? Well, I there are some uh some rays of hope. David Brin, the science fiction writer who uh wrote the
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postman who’s also a noted commentator on technology said that the thing that is going to regulate technology are these super predators called lawyers. And I think that what you’re going to see is as as Dez has mentioned, you’ve got these cases that are going on about copyright, ownership of data, etc. Class actions are going to start. Those were the sorts of class actions that the Trump administration tried to actually avoid on behalf of big tech in it in Donald Trump’s big beautiful bill
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because he said that um that he was going to let them have a get out of jail free card for 10 years. But unfortunately that’s had to be taken out of the bill mainly I think because there is an awareness that there is the potential for disaster if this headlong rush carries on to try to achieve AI supremacy and and also I think that that’s the real problem. The real problem here is that what we’re confronting is some fundamental flaw in humanity which is that somebody wants to achieve supremacy. Somebody wants to
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achieve absolute control. People have trumpeted about AI being this universal technology. Well, in that case, if it’s for the good of humanity, let’s let’s make it for the good of humanity. Not particular interest groups, not particular countries. We need to have a really good think about that and I think that that’s where the wheels are coming off in all of this at the moment. Well, that brings us back to again both themes today have been all around trust and and can we trust the tech firms and as
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somebody who’s been a privacy campaigner um and has seen the failure of governments and regulators to actually take much in the way of action against big tech and the need for under the the Max Shrem’s case with against Privacy Shield and Safe Harbor for a a group of uh well motivated campaigners to actually be the only people to step forward and really hold people account. My confidence is low here. Um but obviously there are there’s a limited amount that individuals governments can
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do against these big tech firms. But this brings us to to our our third and and our final theme and that is um uh the ultimate sanction um that that uh uh countries or companies can can take and that is um uh switching off the internet entirely. Um and we’ve had examples um uh uh in various different countries where there have be concerns obviously that the the services might be um cel for Ukraine at a time when it’s in a desperate situation. Um uh there have also been talk about individual services
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being removed from from users if they uh don’t comply with with certain different rules. Um what is uh the the chances of us using um a cut off on the internet as an ultimate sanction? I mean, Pete, if Myanmar continue to do a a level of persecution of minorities, shouldn’t we just switch off their internet and and and see how quickly they they start to to to uh us behave more reasonably? >> Well, uh yes, I mean these these are questions of ethics. Then you have these issues though because you you you get again Dez
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Dez spoke about the you know the those early internet pioneer days where you had all of these people who were saying oh we’ll always find a way around we’ll we’ll always get get out and I mean I will actually take issue with something that that Dez actually had said which is that progressively things have got worse. No in the early days of the internet it was a wild west. One of the things was that there were a lot of groups who had a vested interest in perhaps evading the forces of law and
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order who were going to the internet because it struck them as a very good way of associating. And when I say escaping the forces of law and order that could have been because there was legislation against some practice they they were involved in which was completely ethical in other places. So I’m not suggesting it’s a good and bad. I’m just saying that technology has some uh uh encouragement for for one reason or another. The problem here though is to go and actually pick up another thing
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that desert said, which is that if you’ve got the forces that are behind the networks actually involving in uh bad things, then there seems to be a generalized bad behavior. So if you’re going to get people to cut stuff off, then you’ve actually got to develop a sense of ethics in the first place. I mean, I think, you know, Dez has had some very good ideas in the discussion before the program started about whether you can cut people off or not. And um, you know, I think he’s probably got uh
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more to say about that than I do. >> Well, Des, let’s come up to you then. I mean uh obviously in Australia you’ve been pioneers in a lot of the regulations and we’ve recently applauded uh your approach to uh internet harms. Um what are the sanctions that you’re going to be taking to individuals who resort to VPNs and go around the different rules and and beyond that should we have sanctions that we uh apply against nation states or companies or organizations and even big tech if
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they if they don’t comply or or they don’t have a sense of moral purpose. Well, we’re already taking action with regard to individual companies and certainly industries in Australia. We’ve took we took issue with regard to companies using content from news uh providers uh legitimate news media providers of the fourth estate if you like and protected that industry so that people couldn’t just take the content and put on their platforms and then wrap it up in ads and monetize it. I I want
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to come back though to the the core of kind of what we were talking off air with regard to this topic and that is that we’ve got a situation now in the world where we’ve got countries who are doing the most outrageous things uh and they’re just killing people on mass and I think we have a very real hard conversation to have with ourselves now where there’s a lot of fluff around are we sanctioning countries and you know we’ll name Russia as one um you know Russia invaded Ukraine uh the world was
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in up in arms about it. Uh supposed sanctions were placed on them, but that we’re now hearing that there’s all kinds of backdoor deals being done for buying their oil and gas and other things. Um the the key thing about this for me is that if we are actually bonafidey about taking action against nations that behave badly, such as invading another sovereign nation, there’s actually a really simple solution to this. We just need to be able to hand on heart agree that we’re going to deal with it. So,
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for example, if we’re talking about Russia as an example, without necessily, you know, isolating them for any particular reason, but they’re the they’re the hot topic right now. How do we bring them under control? Well, we take them off the internet. That’s actually not hard to do. They’ll find some back doors and route around it, but generally, if the world decides that we’re going to cut them off, we have been able to cut off countries before, and countries have certainly cut
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themselves off before. We take them off the telephone network. We take them off the internet. We take them off the Swift financial network so they can’t move money around. We take them off the postal system. We shut down the borders. I mean, I I currently send postcards to people in Russia that I am postcard friends with in various parts of Russia that are not supposedly part of the war. And it struck me the other day that on my mailing list to people that I swap photo picture postcards with, I realized
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actually this is going to Russia. How am I getting postage into Russia? maybe they’re not as sanctioned as we thought. Um, so I think what I really wanted to talk about with this topic was if we are genuinely serious about stopping things like wars where nations like Russia illegally invade a sovereign nation called Ukraine, we can actually pull the lever. It’s actually one of my favorite jobs I see in the AI world and it’s and it’s been in the data center world for a while. One of my favorite jobs that I
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love applying for just for a laugh is the plug puller. I don’t know if you’ve heard this one, but you know, a lot of big AI companies have this laughing sort of moment where they put out a job saying that we need someone who’s a plug puller and if the thing goes rogue, we want you to be the one to pull a plug in and kill it. Um, if we generally want to take action rather than faffing around and pretending they’re quote unquote sanctioning, which doesn’t really have any impact and and where it suits
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nations, they will find a way around. Russia is still selling oil, it’s still selling gold, it’s still selling gas, and it’s being routed through various nations. But if we really wanted to to just bring them to a halt, we could literally just take them off the internet, take them off the phone network, stop sending posters to them, stop deliveries in and out, and take them off the financial swift network. Those key steps and probably a couple of small things elsewhere like cancelling
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travel completely, shutting down their airspace, making sure that no flights can go in and out of the country. You do that and within 24 hours, people would be at the table having a conversation about pulling their weapons out of a a nation they invaded. There’s no question about it. We’ve seen it happen before and we will definitely have to do it in in the future. Uh we don’t need to go to war dropping bombs on them. We don’t need to drop atom bombs on people anymore. We have the technology to do
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this. It doesn’t need AI. It’s literally just a general agreement by United Nation members to say we’re going to cut this these people off until they behave better. Cuz 24 hours without money moving around, without telefan, without postage, without being able to move in and out of the country, without flights going, they are definitely going to pay attention. So Pete, is this the ultimate sanction or is it a step toward? Is it an escalation? And and who should hold this power at the moment? Um largely it’s the
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the the US in in control of many of the uh key components of the infrastructure. Should it be the UN? How can this be applied? And is it a a tool that should be used at all? >> I think it should be used. I mean quite interestingly back in 1996, one of the the then head of defense intelligence uh said that there was a need to for the UK to assert its borders in cyerspace. Um I know this because um I managed to obtain a copy of that report. Um and I think he’s absolutely right. I think that what we’ve seen is this ongoing
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abrogation of responsibility that has mainly occurred because of a total ignorance of technology by the body politic and that that I think that’s unforgivable. I think that what we should do is we should take back our national control of our technological space and we should say right there’s XY Z is going to happen within our borders and we’re we’re going to actually be running it. We shouldn’t be going capinand to large technology companies. I mean, you know, these are technology
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companies that as a result of our current, well, let’s call it supine attitude. They’ve now got um revenues that are larger than the revenues of most nation states in the world. These are phenomenally powerful organizations and we’ve allowed them to become that. What we should be doing is saying, “No, in our area this is what goes.” Then you can form treaties with other nations and say, “Yeah, we don’t agree with what Russia’s doing. We don’t agree with what’s going on perhaps in the Middle
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East. As a result of that, we’re going to take back control of our borders.” And as Dez says, right, this is money. We we when we’re talking about technology, we’re talking about the old world and in terms of how you exert control. And let’s just think remember something else too which is that China was in this state of isolation until it was brought out by Henry Kessinger and Dang Xiaoing and then suddenly their economy flourished. So as Dez says, if you can actually put a a economy in a
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position where you can cut off that ability to be part of the world, then they would rapidly start to respond and start to say, “Okay, yeah, it looks as though I have to behave like a normal human being if I want to be part of the normal human world.” >> Okay. And obviously Dez um uh there’s a issue here about who is controlled. The the Australians have have innovated in this. What do you think the Australians would find acceptable? The US control um or any use of this sort of uh uh
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leverage or this tool in any manner at all. >> I I think we need to look at it from the point of view that countries themselves already have that level of control. If Australia wanted to cut itself off from the internet at large, it could and it would. Uh if Australia wanted to cut off a particular nation, it can and does. We already block certain countries from Australia. Uh we’ve had state level attacks from multiple countries where we’ve just blocked them completely for a period of time until they behave. We’ve
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also had the same thing from companies. So if there is a rogue IP address block or a rogue autonomous system number or AS number, we just block them. We just cut them off the internet. Uh similarly, we can do that with phone systems. We do that with all trading uh channels. You know, we cut off postal systems. We stop supplying to people. And the same happens to Australia. One of our prime ministers unfortunately opened his mouth and made a comment about something with regard to the source of the CO 19
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pandemic. And then immediately uh China decided it didn’t want to buy Australian wine anymore. It took years about four or five years before China decided that it would allow us to ship wine to China anymore and they just switched us off. So this is already happening. This is already something that’s being done around the world in different areas. I think the the topic we’re sort of talking about now is taking it to the next level which is can the United Nations as a group decide we have had
00:34:12
enough. We are no longer going to bear reality TV style watching of social media content of people in Ukraine being killed. And the same is happening in other parts of the world without naming one in the Middle East which um is probably a little bit sensitive at the moment. But you know the question’s got to be asked first you know at what point do we have enough? How many people in Ukraine have to die before we decide that we’re going to do something about it serious other than pretending
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sanctions? I mean, there’s a conversation happening right now in part of the world between two leaders that actually aren’t the leaders of that sovereign nation, Ukraine, about how to solve the war problem. That in itself is problematic to me because if the person that’s leading that country isn’t at the table, then why are other people trying to negotiate about their nation in the first place, giving away blocks of it? >> Um, so I think it comes back to, you know, can if the United Nations is
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actually functional and it can function properly, um, it should be able to sit up and pay attention saying that’s it. We’ve had enough. there are enough people in Ukraine who have died. We now need to take these steps. And these steps are pretty clear. Eventually, you start cutting off utilities and basic services, moving money around. Uh and and the pain is so great that they have to come to the table. We’ve seen that with the First World War. We’ve seen it with the Second World War when
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eventually nations, rogue nations, started running out of military supplies, they ran out of food, they ran out of human beings, things stop. And I think that’s something that in the modern world we need to look at that bullets aren’t going to be the solution anymore. And that goes back to, you know, is it AI? No, not necessarily. It’s technology in general. >> Okay. Well, overall, a theme across all of the topics that we’ve discussed here is that of trust and um some form of
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enforcement uh when we cannot trust entities and can we trust our politicians to actually do any form of sort of reasonable enforcement. Uh we spoke initially about the UK online safety bill which I think shows a a lack of understanding by politicians in the UK about what the real harms are and what the real approach should be to addressing these and and we mentioned the Australians have a better approach potentially. We looked at AI and whether that can be trusted and and and to a large extent we’ve got a bubble uh
00:36:22
driven by a number of what could argue to be rogue organizations pro presenting uh uh data full of hallucinations and largely pirated at source. And and finally we look at the the the ultimate sanction here. um can we turn the internet off to those entities or or countries that are not only uh doing abuse online but obviously real in the real physical world as as we’re seeing in Ukraine and and in many other countries. um my confidence in terms of actually our government stepping up to the mark. Certainly um in in the UK and
00:36:57
the US where I see a a a level of lack of understanding of the technology and certainly um in uh the current US administration a focus on uh the commercial benefits of everything at the possibly the expense of regulation or control is a ground for concern and I’m sure that we’re going to come back to to revisit this. So Pete Dez, great as ever to chat to you both today. I look forward to uh picking up some of these discussions and exploring more areas as we move forward. Um hopefully this will
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be a regular discussion where we can chew the card on some of the big issues and thanks again for joining us and thanks everyone for viewing. [Music] [Music]
