Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics How Will AI Change The World? (Ep 1) About this episode How will AI reshape the way we live, earn, and design our lifestyles over the next decade? With investment in AI increasing a billion fold the last 12 years – is this a gold mine or a classic bubble? And why is so little attention being paid to this issue?
Rory Stewart is joined by former government advisor of AI, and author of the AI Action Plan, for a members only mini-series on the future of Artificial Intelligence.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Rory Stewart? This is the single most important opportunity challenge in our lifetimes. I'm afraid it's bigger, more transformative than climate change, the Trump administration, what Russia is doing in Ukraine.
0:13 Speaker 01 You might be underselling it. Far from being in a bubble, AI is underhyped.
0:18 Rory Stewart? These companies aren't trying to build toys. They're trying to build something that can do everything that a human can do.
0:23 Speaker 01 Whether it's in coding, whether it's in radiology, whether it's legal work. We're already seeing AI models being able to outperform humans in certain domains.
0:30 Rory Stewart? And yet, the basic debate is, is it going to be able to write my essay for school for me? Most of these companies are relatively new and the people at the top of them are unbelievably personally wealthy. People have made AI videos and it's pretty coherent. It looks good. The problem, these large language models exist only at the moment in China and the US.
0:51 Speaker 01 AI, which is taking over the world. My worry is that we say, let's be cautious, let's not adopt, let's try and preserve things as they are. But our competitors internationally don't do that. We need a solution to stagnation and it's very possible that AI is our way out of the mess.
1:09 Rory Stewart? Or our route into mass unemployment, increased inequality and massive threats to the future of humanity.
1:15 Speaker 01 I suppose the thing that is most urgent is that no one knows and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
1:24 Rory Stewart? Hi, it's Rory here and I've just recorded a very exciting series on what I believe is the single most important issue facing us. And that isn't actually China, Russia, Ukraine, maybe even not climate. It is artificial intelligence. I've been sitting down with Matt Clifford, who was the government's AI advisor, who put together the AI Safety Summit, who's an entrepreneur. And we've been really getting into the details of this, what it means for geopolitics, what it could mean for our economy, what it could mean for jobs, what it could mean actually to the existential future of humanity, not to be too pretentious about it. And the way in which politicians are simply not talking about it, the public isn't engaged.
2:06 Rory Stewart? And we haven't really started this discussion properly. So here's a taster for you. And if you'd like to hear more, I'm really proud of this series. Please do sign up and become a member. Go to therestispolitics.com, sign up to Trip Plus and come with us on the series through artificial intelligence.
2:28 Rory Stewart? This is something which can change all our lives for good or ill. And yet it's something about which we know so little. I've set it up in very grand terms. Do you agree with me that it's a bigger issue than climate change in Russia?
2:45 Speaker 01 I actually think if anything, where we are and where we're going might be underhyped. So like three facts I often use with politicians to try and bring this home, why this might be real. One, it's already here in the GDP numbers. So if you look at US economic growth in the first half of this year, without AI, the US economy would have grown by about 0.1%. With AI, it's about 1.1%. So in other words, like AI is already accounting. Now, this is mainly CapEx build out, the build out of these huge data centers. But AI already accounting for 90% of US economic growth in 2025. So like, we cannot ignore it, even if all you care about is today. Second thing, you know, you mentioned a business that I've built, entrepreneurs first. I've been investing in AI for about 12 years.
3:28 Speaker 01 Over that period, we have seen an increase in the investment in AI, the inputs of about a billion fold. I don't think that's ever been true in the history of technology before. And by the way, at the time, people thought, was there a bubble? You know, I remember people saying, oh, is there a bubble? We've now invested billion fold more each year as a species in this, in this technology. So that's, that's the second big thing. The third big thing is we're seeing this extraordinary competition for, for talent and for the other raw inputs of AI, energy, chips, et cetera. The stat that I like to use is Mark Zuckerberg is so worried about the impact that AI might have on his business, Meta, that he is now paying top AI researchers $250 million a year to come and work at Meta rather than somewhere else.
4:12 Speaker 01 Now, maybe he's crazy, but something is happening and it's something that we shouldn't ignore.
4:16 Rory Stewart? Single human individual.
4:17 Speaker 01 Single human individual.
4:18 Rory Stewart? Who make $250 million a year because of their knack of being able to work.
4:22 Speaker 01 Their ability to squeeze intelligence, I guess you would say, out of this, this infrastructure.
4:29 Rory Stewart? Okay, well, let's try to think about what the big issues are around AI. And I think the first one is the question of power. So if these machines work remotely in the way that the people funding them and dreaming about them hope.
4:46 Rory Stewart? They are going to be very, very capable indeed. They're going to be able to do many things, at least as well as humans, and some things better than humans. And, and I think that's the beginning of the whole conversation because that is huge potential to do good. For example, creating medicines, huge potential to do bad, for example, creating deadly viruses. Fantastic capacity for improving defence and security, but also, on the other hand, a threat that could be posed to us.
5:17 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
5:18 Rory Stewart? So that's one thing I think we need to get into. What are the capabilities of these machines? What can they actually do? Now, the second thing, of course, that goes along with power, who has that power?
5:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:27 Rory Stewart? Right. And we can think about that in different ways.
5:32 Rory Stewart? Is the power concentrated in a very small handful of companies around the world? Companies which already account for something like thirty percent of the entire US stock exchange, which is seventy percent of the global stock exchange. So let's say twenty percent of the entire global equity markets have bound up in these companies. Or can you think about it in terms of countries? Because these large language models exist only at the moment in China and the US.
5:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:59 Rory Stewart? So is there a sovereignty problem? Does that mean the US and China now has its hands effectively on our throats if they wish to assert that influence? What happens if these things somehow get out of control? What would happen if these things are not safe, that we can't predict, explain or control them? And there, the problem is not that we're being controlled by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, or we've been controlled by Xi Jinping, but potentially these things are no longer under anyone's control. So huge issues to get into. So I'm going to pose as a new, I don't know, minister appointed in the Department of AI. How would you begin by trying to explain to me what AI is and isn't?
6:36 Speaker 01 I think I'd start by saying something like the reason humans are special is our ability to reason. You know, our ability to solve problems in the world in order to achieve our goals. And for a very long time, that has been the, the only way to do thinking, to do reasoning, has been in the human brain. And we have, over the last, well, depending on how you measure it, you know, say, let's say a hundred years, figured out lots of ways to get machines to help us do that. But until now, that's very much been about tools. You know, a calculator is way better than you or me at arithmetic. But no one would say a calculator is thinking. But the explicit goal of the company's building AI, artificial intelligence, is to build what they call AGI, artificial general intelligence. In other words, not tools, but brains, if you like.
7:21 Speaker 01 Machines that are capable of doing everything that a human could do. Now, they're not there yet, but that's the goal.
7:27 Rory Stewart? So the goal is that this thing would be much more flexible, much more general in the kind of tasks it could take on. Unlike a calculator, which can't write a Shakespeare poem, can't help me fry an egg. These machines ultimately would be able to, if they became super intelligent, be able to do everything a human could do better.
7:53 Speaker 01 That's the goal of the company's building them. And you know, there's lots of different definitions of AGI, artificial general intelligence. And then you've already mentioned superintelligence, which is almost a stage beyond where the machine can do more than any human can do. The definition I like of AGI, or at least I think a helpful starting point is, imagine an artificial intelligence that can do anything a remote worker can do. Now, that's important because of course, part of the way that you think is actually embodied. You have a body and you use it to do all sorts of things. But there are lots of tasks today, particularly after the pandemic, that the only connection to the real world you need is a mouse and a keyboard and a screen. So one way of thinking about what AGI is, is it's a, it's an artificial intelligence system that is a plug and play replacement for anything a remote worker can do.
8:37 Rory Stewart? Okay, so let's start with what for most of us was the big wake up moment, which was the release of a ChatGPT three. And it was the moment where suddenly on the market, we woke up to something that we could talk to that was no longer a kind of clunky chatbot giving us weird answers. We'd had those sort of things for 10, 15 years when you're trying to, I don't know, deal with what's going wrong with your telephone or your bank. Suddenly you've got something that was able almost immediately to do extraordinary things. And to give you an example, you know, on my way into work yesterday, I asked it to analyze all multilateral institutions in the world.
9:22 Rory Stewart? This year and bring out common themes from all the different multilateral conferences.
9:26 Speaker 01 Right.
9:27 Rory Stewart? And here I saw both its strengths and its weaknesses. It managed to produce this incredibly beautifully organized, precise tailored answer going right up to what had happened the previous day. It wasn't doing it through finding an article on Google. Nobody had written about the subject up to yesterday before. It thought of dimensions I would never have thought of, historical, economic. It personalized it to me in a way that was extraordinary, but it also got stuff wrong. For example, it complimented me on my amazing job administering Mosul in northern Iraq. And I never administered Mosul in northern Iraq. And indeed, what I did in Iraq wasn't that amazing. So it was a sort of wonderful kind of example of incredible power fluency and getting stuff a bit wrong.
10:13 Rory Stewart? I mean, is that your sense too, that this is really when the public woke up was the the release of these things that we call large language models? We'll get on to what they are in a second.
10:20 Speaker 01 Absolutely. And, you know, I think for people who'd been in the field for a while, in a way, it was it was quite a surprise because you could look at it at this discontinuous moment. We go from AI basically being very hard to get on anyone's agenda to suddenly everyone wants to talk about AI all the time. The other way of looking is actually a smooth curve. It's just that it finally crossed a threshold where it was useful in the ways that you describe. One thing I would say, which I find really interesting is when you talk privately to the people at OpenAI who released that particular product, ChatGPT, they were also taken by surprise. You know, they did not expect it to become the fastest growing consumer application of all time. I mean, it's worth just giving the stats on that.
11:02 Speaker 01 So within two months of its release, a hundred million people were using it. That's never happened before, ever. You know, the fastest growing consumer app before that was TikTok and that took nine months to get to a hundred million. So there was something very special, but they didn't know it. I think the team size at the time within OpenAI, working on ChatGPT specifically at the time, was like five or six people. So it was it was a huge moment.
11:22 Rory Stewart? What are things that people don't understand about what these things can do? I mean, I often meet people who will say, well, it's not that awesome. It's not that very different from a Google search. It's not very useful for me. I don't think it's really going to make any difference to my company. I don't think it's really making a difference to the world. Are there a few ways of really making? I don't being unfair to my mother, but making my mother wake up and realise that this thing really is extraordinary. How would you illustrate how amazing this new technology is and why it could make huge difference?
11:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think it's really instructive to look at the history of chess. So there was a long period of time where humans were just obviously better than machines. Then there's the famous
12:03 Rory Stewart? And we were very proud of it.
12:04 Speaker 01 Extremely proud of it. In fact, we thought chess was so hard and complicated that it would be like one of the last things to go. This was like the, you know, we would hold up for these gods of chess as like the the paragons of what human intelligence was.
12:16 Rory Stewart? Chess grandmasters, the Carvajal and Kasperov were considered, the Bobby Fishers were considered geniuses.
12:21 Speaker 01 They are in in that domain. And then, of course, in the late 90s, you have this very famous match between Kasparov and Deep Blue, which, by the way, is not a modern AI system at all.
12:30 Rory Stewart? Different type of system.
12:31 Speaker 01 Completely different type of system. But, you know, to cut a long story short, Deep Blue wins. The machine is better than the human.
12:37 Rory Stewart? Right. And then there's an extraordinary moment, which I remember. And Gary Marcus, I think, writes about this at NYU. He's a bit of an AI skeptic and he's he's saying, well, yeah, okay, Deep Blue has managed to beat Kasparov. But actually, and this is now going back 10 years, we've discovered that a human and a computer is better than any computer in the world.
12:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
12:58 Rory Stewart? And so there were these extraordinary teams of humans and computers. And if you were a chess grandmaster, you were quite cheered up by that because you still seem to be very necessary to the system. You could make the computer better. And then?
13:08 Speaker 01 And that, yeah, so we some some people called this like the Centaur era on the basis that, you know, the center is the hybrid and, you know, it's human machine teams were the best. Sadly, or not, depending on how you look at it, today, the human has nothing to contribute. Like you really get nothing from adding the the human into the mix.
13:24 Rory Stewart? Makes it worse.
13:25 Speaker 01 It makes it worse. Yeah. And so sadly, I'm 40 years old, but, you know, I employ some young people and they they have this great phrase of like, that's cope. Meaning you're telling yourself that to feel better about the world. I think the idea that there's this long term, stable equilibrium of the Centaur era of human machine, you know, interaction being the best is probably cope.
13:46 Rory Stewart? Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed that and you'd like to hear more from this series on AI from Matt Clifford and me getting into the real issues, sign up at therestispolitics.com.
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