This is a John Bachelor, conversation with Professor John Cochran of Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, about the proposition that artificial intelligence, AI is a threat to democracy that's right

threat to promoting democracy threat to democracy everywhere needing

regulation here's John to make a very good case for artificial

intelligence unregulated or lightly regulated or with competition, all very successful in that it could be the next

rung of growth up as John uses that metaphor. Here's John Cochran on the genius of AI, the promise of AI, not a threat is my measure.

More of this tonight. It is a tool.

Yes, basically what AI does is they've figured out that the basic idea of the large

language models is predict what the next word is given the last

30,000 words and that basic idea turns out to do a tremendously good job of

summarizing after it's been trained on a whole corpus of data what it sees out there.

So that's a tool and I think a tremendously valuable tool.

We should be cheering.

There's been some worry.

Growth has slowed down in the US and throughout the world.

Growth always comes from big new innovations that get worked out. You know, we invent the steam engine,

boom, we grow, we invent the airplane, boom, we grow, we invent the transistor, boom, we grow.

What was the big new invention?

We were kind of scratching our heads, and AI looks like that's going to be it.

So one more in this, you know, we've got one more rung of this great ladder of economic

growth. Now it's going to be disruptive. You know, you mentioned use it for copy editing. Well, the copy

editing jobs are going to go away as typist jobs and carbon paper support jobs went away, but they'll be replaced by new jobs. People will become more productive,

wealthier, it's all a wonderful thing if we allow competition.

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