"Artificial Intelligence in a Human World" with Prof. Toby Walsh
Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps
Josh Szeps
4.5 • 905 Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Is it legit for tech companies to vacuum up everything humans create, to spin off A.I. content, and not to compensate humans? Will this world of creative artificial creatures promote or corrode human creativity?
In America, two tech giants just won landmark court cases over their use of copyrighted works to train A.I. models. The court found that Meta and Anthropic didn't violate copyright when they trained their large language models on books without the authors' permission.
This raises big questions. Who gets to create? What is A.I. actually doing, under the hood? How is it impacting human work? Is the famous "Turing Test" even relevant any more? And by what measure would we even know if machines are "intelligent"? Might we already have achieved Artificial General Intelligence and will only know it with hindsight?
Professor Toby Walsh is one of the most respected - and most measured - A.I. academics in the world. He studied theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge, and got his PhD in artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He's currently a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, where he runs the A.I. Institute, and the former editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence.
At this tipping point in the evolution of A.I., Toby and Josh wrestle with the development of artificial intelligence, its future... and where that leaves the rest of us. Toby's new book is "The Shortest History of A.I."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Gooday, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you. |
| 0:09.3 | Artificial general intelligence, the holy grail of AI, the moment at which computers become smarter than us, which many people estimate might be just a year or two away, could actually |
| 0:22.2 | be underway right now. And not only could we be in the middle of it, but we may not even be able |
| 0:27.6 | to identify, even in principle, when we are past it until it's too late, and we can only identify |
| 0:33.5 | it by looking back and saying, aha, that was the moment that we were all unaware when |
| 0:38.6 | computers became the most intelligent species on the planet. Today's guest, Toby Walsh, |
| 0:44.1 | is one of the world's leading artificial intelligence academics. He is a professor of artificial |
| 0:49.7 | intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He's the chief scientist at the UNSW Artificial Intelligence Institute. |
| 0:57.3 | He got his degree in theoretical physics and mathematics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. |
| 1:03.7 | He got a degree in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, and he was literally the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. |
| 1:12.2 | So he knows what he's talking about. |
| 1:13.6 | And I love Toby because he's not a doomsayer, he's not an arm-waver, he just understands |
| 1:18.5 | all of the facts, he understands the science, he understands the maths, he understands what's |
| 1:21.5 | going on under the hood, and he understands and can predict, I think, with quite a level-headed |
| 1:26.8 | clarity, the likely challenges that |
| 1:29.5 | we're going to face much sooner than we think. We talk about lots here. We talk about the experience |
| 1:34.9 | of using chat GPT. We talk about the history of artificial intelligence, and we talk about the |
| 1:40.0 | disruptions that it's likely to have on the labour force. I mean, none of this is incredibly new stuff, |
| 1:43.8 | but I felt it was time for an update. I should say, a big happy 4th of July to our American |
| 1:48.5 | listeners. I was thinking about doing something celebrating America for this episode, and then I thought, |
| 1:53.4 | ah, you're going to have a lot of that anyway, but I wanted to say congratulations and, you know, |
| 1:58.4 | good going on 249 years of something. Love you guys. Also, if you, if the, |
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