Time now for our Wall Street Week daily segment, the host of Wall Street Week,
David Westin, joining us as he does every day at this time.
David, a lot of great interviews that are featured on Wall Street week.
And I'm told that you had a chance to sit down with a couple of folks to talk
about AIG today. Yeah, back to day, I but from a slightly
different direction. We have two people who wrote an article
that's out today, action for the first time with the geopolitics of it.
What it's going to have to do with the way we regulate, the way we structure
this around the world. It's written by Ian Bremmer.
He's raised in group president and Mustafa Suleyman Inflexion, AIG
co-founder. He's also the author of The Coming Wave
Technology, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma.
That's coming out just in a week or two. We talked to them, started talking about
how big and how fast this is coming and what the governments have to do about
it. This is going to be the most important
transformation of our lifetimes. I mean, think about it.
Everything that has made us productive as a species is our intelligence.
Everything around us is created because we have the ability to simulate, to
plan, to imagine. And now we're teaching machines to do
the same thing. We have generative AI with many other
machine learning tools now which are getting better and better at producing
great value in the world. And I think that is going to be the
biggest turbo boost to productivity and invention and creation that we've seen
in the history of our species. This this next couple of decades are
exactly the productivity boost that we need.
And we've seen technological waves in the past.
I mean, perhaps one of the things we think about is the Internet, which
changed an awful lot of the way we conduct our lives, also changed the way
governments react with one another. Corporations do.
Is this the same sort of of change or is this of a different kind?
Well, it's similar in the sense that the Internet in the virtual world, the
digital world, technology companies are dominant.
They're functionally sovereign in deciding how the Internet functions.
Who gets to see what? How you interact?
Do you have a platform? Do you not?
But with artificial intelligence, the influence and power that the digital
world has over our lives in how we think, in what we're capable of doing as
individuals, as corporations, as governments in our national security, in
our economic productivity is increasingly being driven by these same
technology companies. So it's one thing to say that technology
companies have control of something that's kind of marginal.
It's another to say that they have control over something that is
fundamental to how we think about power in the world.
And if you want to regulate it and govern it, as Mustafa and I are saying,
is utterly essential. And yesterday that means that you're
going to have to work together with the technology companies in creating these
institutions and architecture. And that is something we've never seen
before. Yeah.
And I want to talk about the proposals you and Mustafa have in Foreign Affairs.
But but I'm curious about as we go into this.
Are the incumbents likely to prevail, at least in the initial phases?
I mean, that both in the private sector in terms of the really big tech
companies, but also some of the countries that have rather than have
not? I think we don't know.
I mean, the fact is that right now there are only a very small number of
companies in two countries that are dominant players in AI.
My co-author and friend, Mustafa, one of them in that White House meeting with
Biden just a couple of weeks ago, there were only seven represented.
But this technology is expanding far faster than Moore's Law.
It's ten x every generation, as opposed to, you know, in a year as opposed to
two X every two, two years for semiconductor speed, for example, and
reduction of price and and the proliferation of the influence of those
models, not just in terms of what companies build them, but what
individuals and organizations. Some for good, some for nefarious
purposes, will be able to drive this revolution within a matter of a very few
years. We're talking not about ten actors or
100. We're talking about hundreds of
thousands. Mustafa The of the challenges for
governance are just enormous as you lay out with E and in this foreign affairs
piece out just today. But it strikes me that any one
government has a challenge in trying to catch up with technological change.
We've seen that again and again, and we're learning something.
It needs to be, I think, global given its nature.
What are the basic approaches that should be taken?
Understanding that none of us I don't think perhaps not even you knows
actually where it's going to end up. Look, I think technologies are always
very difficult to predict. By their very nature.
They have emergent properties where they interact with the world and they are
actually used and they they're then adapted.
They change form and change shape, and they're doing that very, very quickly.
So the challenge is really significant, but I think there are lessons that we
can draw from existing processes. So for example, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has been incredibly effective at bringing
together a very, very diverse group of scientists, civil society groups,
academics and of course, governments to actually establish the scientific fact
base for what is happening over a multi-decade period.
And I think that we need something kind of similar for artificial intelligence.
Think of it as an international panel on AI, and its primary job would be to be
an independent, science based, accurate assessment of the pace of change, the
strengths and weaknesses of these models, their constituent inputs.
So the data that is used to train them, the chips that are used, you know, that
they train on and that would, I think, help people to get some confidence that
there is an independent expert body that is at least tracking progress.
And finally, and there's the multipolar issue that you lay out in your piece,
there's also a bipolar issue, which, as I understand it, one of the things
you're suggesting is we have to start with United States and China right where
we are, because they're in many ways, the two leaders on it.
What are the hopes and dreams that you have for United States and China to come
to anything approaching a framework jointly to address A.I.?
Well, this is a question that the Bloomberg audience is going to
particularly resonate with, because AI is not like an arms race between the
United States and the Soviet Union. Now the US and China, it's much more.
More like a structural aspect of our global order that must be harnessed and
can't be allowed to destroy everything we've built.
In that regard, it's much more like the financial markets and and Mustafa and I
suggest a techno prudential approach to regulation, like the macroprudential
approach we have in the marketplace. Think of the Financial Stability Board,
the IMF, the Bank of International Settlements.
These are all organizations that the Americans, the Europeans, the Japanese
and the Chinese are a part of, and they are.
The reason they join is because they all want to identify and mitigate risks to
global stability in the financial markets without choking off innovation.