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Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

A.I., Iran, & Automated War with Prof. Toby Walsh

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

Josh Szeps

Comedy Interviews, Education, Society & Culture, Comedy, Self-improvement

4.5 • 905 Ratings

šŸ—“ļø 2 March 2026

ā±ļø 91 minutes

šŸ§¾ļø Download transcript

Summary

Among the first responses by IranianĀ state media to the US-Israeli war on IranĀ was a propaganda video. It flaunted row upon row of gleaming Iranian drones, safely lined up in an underground weapons cache, ready toĀ strike Israel, Arab states and US bases. Drones.Ā Precision-Guided Munitions. A.I.Ā war games.Ā Autonomous Weapon Systems. AtĀ the Pentagon, at Anthropic, for Trump and in Iran, they're redefining warfare in real time. When the Pentagon's A.I. partner, Anthropic, insisted its systems mustn't be used to spy on Americans or to build killer robots, President Trump baulked. On Friday, Trump directed every federal U.S. agency to stop working with Anthropic, and the Pentagon declared Anthropic to be a "supply-chain risk" - a designation normally reserved for companies in enemy nations, which would bar even private defence contractors from using Anthropic's A.I. Its competitor,Ā OpenAI, stepped in and took the Pentagon contract instead. As conflict spreads across the Middle East, how is artificial intelligence being used? How will these fights change in the near future? Can we control it? Toby Walsh thinks so.Ā  He's theĀ Chief Scientist at the UNSW A.I. Institute and a leading voice in the global regulation of A.I. weapons. He studiedĀ theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge University, has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, andĀ was theĀ editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. Toby stopped by theĀ Uncomfortable Conversations studios on his way to the airport to fly to Geneva to participate in a United Nations conference about A.I. in warfare.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Goody, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and a lot of dangerous ideas floating around at the moment. Iran being the biggest of them. A lot of people asking me what I think about the American and Israeli strike on Iran. Most of the coverage and analysis seems to be, look,

0:23.7

he was a bad guy, Hamanae, and the regime was terrible, but this is illegal, and so, and we don't

0:30.6

know what is going to come of it. And I think I just broadly agree with that rather boring and

0:36.2

banal interpretation, unfortunately.

0:38.7

If, you know, the Iranian people are a fabulous culture and an amazing people and incredibly

0:45.8

industrious and innovative and culturally self-aware and sophisticated.

0:49.3

And so I've long felt that they've been imprisoned for the past nearly four decades under crazy, you know,

0:56.5

dictatorial, theocratic idiots, jihadist, death cultists who just want the worst for

1:03.9

Western civilization and for Jews and women and, you know, the list goes on. So on a narrow

1:10.7

level was a little part of me happy when

1:12.9

Chaminet was reported dead? Absolutely. And I sort of admire the gumption of finally trying

1:19.6

to do something about the situation. But it's clear that there is no rationale either under

1:25.3

international law or under American law for doing this. Iran posed no threat,

1:30.5

in fact, the very fact that it was so unthreatening at the moment because it had been so

1:33.6

successfully degraded in the strikes in the middle of last year against its nuclear facilities

1:38.5

and so thoroughly degraded by a succession of incredible Israeli security operations like the

1:43.7

exploding pages on

1:45.0

Hezbollah in Lebanon and targeted assassinations in Iran. That's why it made this such a low-cost

1:53.0

and achievable outcome for the Americans and the Israelis. So the very grounds on which one might

2:00.1

want to base a rationale for a preemptive war, namely that your adversary is formidable under an imminent threat are the very reason why this undertaking was taken now. I mean, the fact that those conditions were not met. It's not just legalistic, persnickety nonsense to care about international law and American law.

2:20.4

These are the, you know, international law, perhaps one can make an argument is easier to ignore,

2:27.5

since even the Iraq war was in contravention of international law.

...

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