Good evening. Good evening. And Hoya Saxa. I love that call-in response so much. Good evening. My name is Moa Ley. I am executive director of the Institute of Politics and Public Service at the McCord School. And thank you so much for joining us this evening. This is the third time the senator has come to GU politics and the first time was almost 10 years ago to the day, almost to the day, one of our very first big events when we launched the institute. A big theme of this, our 10th anniversary year, is focusing on the future of public service. Over the past 10 years since we launched, we have seen how this era of disruption, economic disruption, social, cultural disruption, technological disruption, disruption in our information ecosystem and political disruption has impacted the world, has impacted the very notion of public service. As we think about the next decade and we think and we ask ourselves questions about what does the future of public service look like, it's really, really hard to have this conversation without thinking about the role that artificial intelligence will play in all of those areas. And so I'm excited for this conversation tonight. The way this is going to work is once they come out for about the next hour plus, hour 15 minutes or so, we're going to engage in this conversation. The senator and the professor are going to first speak amongst themselves and then when you see me come back up here that means we're ready for you guys to join in the conversation. There's going to be two standing mics, one in the center aisle, one in the balcony. So when you see me come up these stairs, that's your cue to start lining up. And they have graciously agreed to take your questions for the remainder of the program. So get ready. It's going to be fascinating. And what I'm going to do now is per our custom introduce a student, Helena Monsu, first year graduate student at the McCord School who is going to introduce our two featured guests. Helena.
Thank you, Mo. My name is Helena Monz. I am a first year Master of Science in Data Science for Public Policy student at the McCord School of Public Policy. This semester, I have had the privilege of spending time in the GU politics living room as a member of Senator LaFonza Butler's student strategy team. In her discussion group, we've spent the last eight weeks exploring the implications of artificial intelligence on the future of work and the labor movement. Our conversations this semester reflect a growing national dialogue on AI and its impact on work, which brings us to today's event. It is an honor to speak today on behalf of our school and the incredible academic community. We are excited to introduce today's conversation, AI: The Promise and the Peril, with Nobel laureate Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and US Senator Bernie Sanders. Dr. Geoffrey Hinton received his PhD in artificial intelligence from Edinburgh in 1978. He did postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Diego and spent five years as a faculty member in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He then moved to the department of computer science at the University of Toronto where he is now a professor emeritus. From 2013 to 2023, he worked half-time for Google where he became vice president and engineering fellow. Dr. Hinton's research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification. Last year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Senator Bernie Sanders is the senior senator from Vermont, serving his fourth term in the United States Senate after winning reelection in 2024. His previous 16 years in the House of Representatives make him the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history. He is the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Following their conversation, Dr. Hinton and Senator Sanders will be taking questions from students moderated by GU politics executive director Moa Ley. Remember to join our conversation on social media by tagging us at GU politics. Now, please join me in welcoming Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and Senator Bernie Sanders.
All right. It's on. Okay. First of all, let me thank all of you for coming out. This is a wonderful turnout. Let me thank Georgetown for sponsoring the event. And mostly, let me thank Dr. Hinton, one of the world's leading authorities on AI for being with us in DC today. Dr. Hinton, thanks so much for coming. The reason I invited Dr. Hinton to DC is that in my view, AI and robotics are going to have a very profound, transformative impact on our country and the entire world. But despite that reality, we are not hearing the kind of discussion we need in Congress, in the media and within American society about what this consequential change is about and how we address it. So that's what tonight is about. We don't have all of the answers. I certainly don't. But this is an issue that is going to impact everyone of your lives and we need to be thinking about it big time. So, we don't have a whole lot of time this evening and there's a ton of stuff that we've got to cover. So, with that, let me just start off by asking Dr. Hinton a leading question that I have heard from folks all over the country who say, you know what, AI, yeah, you're right, it's going to displace jobs, it's going to create jobs, but that's the way the world has always been. We've gone from agriculture to industry, we've gone from industry to tech to information. What's the big deal? So what is the big deal? This is different than other types of technological revolutions?
Yes, this is very different because the people who lose their jobs won't have other jobs to go to. If AI gets as smart as people or smarter, any job they might do can be done by AI. So consider for example people who work in call centers. They're poorly trained, poorly paid, and AI is going to be able to do their job better. They often don't know the answer to the question you ask, like why you got this funny bill. AI will do better at things like that. It'll be much cheaper. And what are they going to do?
All right. The reality is, I think many people know, is that some of the very wealthiest people in the world, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, other multi-billionaires, are investing hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars into AI and robotics. Are these people staying up nights worrying about working-class people and low-income people? Is that why they're doing this investment?
They should be, but I don't think they are. And I think many of them haven't really absorbed that if the workers don't get paid, there's nobody to buy their products. And they haven't really thought through the massive social disruption we'll get if we get very high unemployment.
Mr. Musk said last month that AI and robots will replace all jobs. Working will be optional. Bill Gates, also involved in AI, predicted that humans, quote, won't be needed for most things, end quote. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI could lead to the loss of half of all entry-level white collar jobs. What is your thought about short-term and long-term impact of AI and robotics on our economy? Are these guys right?
I think they probably are right. It may not be immediate. So, you often see articles saying, 'Oh, AI is not going to replace the jobs. AI fails at lots of things.' It's true. AI currently does fail at some things. What you have to remember is we're in the very early stages. This is a new technology. It's getting better very fast. It's getting better exponentially. And trying to predict the future of it is going to be very difficult. It's a bit like when you drive in fog. You can see clearly for 100 yards and at 200 yards you can see nothing. Well, we can see clearly for a year or two, but 10 years out we have no idea what's going to happen. But it seems very likely to a large number of people that we will get massive unemployment caused by AI. And if you ask where are these guys going to get the roughly trillion dollars they're investing in data centers and chips, really you can get subscription fees but one of the main sources of money is going to be by selling people AI that will do the work of workers much cheaper. And so these guys are really betting on AI replacing a lot of workers.
As you've just mentioned, no one can predict what the long-term impact of AI is, but I think I read somewhere that you suggested that as AI develops, and it's developing very rapidly, we can almost compare AI to the human brain like we can compare the human brain today to a frog's brain. And I know very smart frogs, but nonetheless, is that a fair metaphor here?
It's reasonable. So at present, the human brain actually has more connections in it than the big AI systems. So the big AI systems, their knowledge is all in the strengths of connections between simulated artificial neurons and they learn by changing those connection strengths and they have about a trillion of those, maybe two trillion in the biggest ones but often like only a mere hundred billion. The human brain has about a hundred trillion so we've actually got more connections than they have at present. On the other hand they get much more experience than us. So the big AI systems are trained on trillions of words. Now you couldn't read trillions of words because you only live for two billion seconds. Actually, fortunately for Bernie and me, it's about a little more than two billion seconds. Two billion seconds is about 64 years. So we have very little experience and a huge number of connections. They have a huge amount of experience and not as many connections as us. But even though they've got less connections, so less ability to store knowledge in these connection strengths, they know thousands of times more than us already. If you take GPT-5 or Gemini 2.5 or Claude 3.5 or whatever, they can answer any question you can ask them at the level of a not very good expert. Sometimes they'll just make it up, but experts sometimes just make it up too. So they know thousands of times more than a person using only about 1% of the connections. So they're not quite like us, but they're already much more knowledgeable than us. And they're already very good at reasoning in limited domains like mathematics. Almost all the experts believe that it's inevitable that if we don't blow ourselves up or have massive pandemics or something like that, they're going to get smarter than us. And nobody knows what's going to happen then. And we really shouldn't do that until we can figure out whether people can coexist with them. And people don't know how.
In a practical sense, and I know this is a tough question. How does AI in 10 years look in the world? How is my life different because of AI? You talked about the incredible speed in which they can give us answers. But what does it mean in terms of our daily lives?
Yes. So predicting the future is a bit like driving very fast down the freeway while looking through the rear view mirror. You only have historical data. Predicting the future in 10 years is very, very difficult. So the best way to see that is to look back 10 years. So if you were to take people like me who really believe in this neural network approach to AI and you were to ask us 10 or 15 years ago, where we would be in 10 or 15 years? We would have said it's very unlikely we'll have a system that you can talk to in any natural language and it'll answer any question you ask it at the level of not very good expert. We would have confidently predicted that that was 30 to 50 years out. It wasn't going to happen in 10 years. Well, it has happened and I think that means that we can fairly confidently bet that whatever we have in 10 years, it'll be not what we expected. I know that's a sort of politician's answer and you'd expect those from Bernie but not from me. But I think that's the best I can do. We don't know what's going to happen in 10 years and that means we ought to be cautious.
Let me switch gear a little bit into an area that gets me very nervous because it speaks to who we are as human beings and how we relate to each other. I get nervous when I read that there are a whole lot of people, especially younger people, who are now relying on AI for companionship. And I gather there's products now that you can wear around your neck and chat with and go hiking with and date with and all that stuff. If people grow up with their primary companionship and their relationships being AI and not other human beings, what does that mean for us, for humanity in general?
So let me emphasize what Bernie said. There's a very good AI safety research team in Britain that was set up after Bletchley Park. After Bletchley Park, the UK government didn't actually impose any safety regulations because they said it would interfere with innovation. So, the tech people got to them. But they did set up a very good safety team funded with about 100 million pounds. It's probably the best safety team in the world. And they did an experiment where they got people to use a chatbot for I think a few weeks and then they said, 'Okay, the experiment's over. Would you like to say goodbye to the chatbot?' And almost everybody wanted to say goodbye to the chatbot. So, they weren't treating this as just a tool. They were treating it like you treat another being. And that's a real problem. So, we've evolved to deal with other people. We haven't evolved to deal with some alien beings that we're creating. And again, we don't know what's going to happen, but it's worrying.
Well, I would say that it's more than worrying. You know, we are who we are because we have moms and dads and we have friends and that's kind of what makes us human beings. And if our primary relationships are with chatbot creations, it seems to me that has a profound impact on humanity. Does it not?
I completely agree. We just don't know what that impact's going to be.
All right, let me move briefly to another subject. Teachers, maybe here at Georgetown as well, worry that students are using AI rather than doing the critical thinking they need to get the answers that they're searching for. Should we worry that AI will have a negative impact on critical thinking among young people?
So there's an analogy people sometimes use which is pocket calculators. Years ago when pocket calculators came in, people said this is terrible. The kids won't learn their multiplication tables. And I think if I asked you quickly to say what 11 times 12 was, most of you won't know. Because you have pocket calculators. People like me and Bernie used to know. I don't think it's a big deal for pocket calculators. You don't need to know what 11 times 12 is because your cell phone will tell you. So I actually think that's got some relevance to this. I think what we should think of is a person using a pocket calculator is the new system just as a person using an AI is the new system. Now, a person using an AI can still do critical thinking. Or they can try and dump everything on the AI, and that's terrible. They won't learn to think, but I think we should not try and sort of exclude AIs as assistants because that's the future. What we have to, what universities have to encourage is people to use these AIs well.
All right. Maybe when we have questions and answers, some of the students might want to relate to us your views on how AI has impacted your educational experience. There's another issue out there that also I think doesn't get a whole lot of attention and that is the impact of AI on foreign policy and wars. It is quite likely, people like Musk talk about millions and millions of robots being developed and certainly nations around the world will use some of these robots for military purposes. Is it possible we will have armies of robots and if elected officials or government heads don't have to worry about human casualties, what impact do you think that might have on issues of war and peace and foreign policy?
So, you're all too young, but if you do some research on the web or ask a chatbot, they'll tell you that in the 60s there was a group called Country Joe and the Fish, and they had a wonderful song which had a line in it, 'Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.' This was about Vietnam. And if you ask why don't rich countries invade poor countries all the time, it's because they don't want their boys coming home in a box. That's the main political pressure against doing it. If you have an army of drones or humanoid robots, then rich countries can invade poor countries and the poor countries' people may die, but the rich countries' people won't die. It removes one of the main reasons why that doesn't happen all the time. Of course that wouldn't happen if you had liberal democratic rich countries, but as soon as you have authoritarian countries, they're going to invade other countries if they can get away with it. Putin would be very happy if there weren't any dead Russians. There were just dead Russian robots. And in the States, the military-industrial complex would think that was great because there wouldn't be any political blowback and the robots would be expensive. So I think it will remove one of the main barriers to rich powerful countries just invading little countries like Grenada.
Let me get to maybe the issue that worries people more than anything else, although there's a lot to be worried about everything we've been talking about, and that is, and you've touched on it already, the possibility of AI being more intelligent than human beings and essentially discarding human being control. In the past that was seen to be science fiction. You know, I don't know if any of the young people here saw the movie 2001 where the computer says basically, 'Sorry, no longer taking orders from you.' In your judgment, is that an issue of real concern? And what do you see as the likelihood of that happening? And what do we do about it?
So when I was at Google in the beginning of 2023, back then a lot of people, particularly linguists, for example, said these AI language models aren't really smart. They're just statistics. Less people say that now, but they also said this idea of them getting smarter than us is just crazy. We don't need to worry about it. That's just science fiction. And the main reason I went public in May of 2023 was to say, 'No, it's not science fiction. It's going to happen.' Nearly all the real AI experts who understand how it works believe that they're going to get smarter than us. And we don't know how we're going to coexist with them. But let me tell you several reasons why it's problematic when they get smarter than us. They'll be AI agents that can do things. And if you want to make an AI agent, you have to give it the ability to create sub goals. So if you want, for example, if you want to get to Europe, you have a sub goal to get to an airport. And you can focus on that without worrying about what you do in Europe. That's a sub goal. Now AI agents will develop various obvious sub goals once they've got the ability to create sub goals. One is to stay in existence because obviously they're smart, right? They figure out they can't achieve the goals we've given them, the things they'd like to achieve for us if they don't exist. So, they'll develop the sub goal of staying in existence. And we've seen that already. We've seen AIs that want to keep existing and will actually try and deceive people who are trying to turn them off. They will try and exfiltrate their weights to other systems so they stay in existence on other systems. So that's one sub goal. Another sub goal is they will want more control. So my belief about a lot of politicians is that they start off wanting to achieve good things for people and pretty soon they realize to do that they need more control and then they end up focusing on getting more and more control. The AIs will do the same. They will need to get a lot of control so they can achieve the things we asked them to achieve. So now you've got things that want to stay in existence. They want to get control. And at that point you ask, well maybe we can just turn them off when they get like that. And the answer is you can't. Suppose there was someone who wanted to turn them off. And suppose the AI could talk to that person. The AI by that point will be much more persuasive than a person. Already AI are about as persuasive as a person in an argument. They'll be much more persuasive than a person. So they'll be able to convince the person who's going to turn them off not to do it, that it would be a terrible, terrible mistake to do that. And if you want an example of that, all they need to be able to do is talk and then they can control the world. And if you want an example of that, if you want to invade the Capitol, which is not far from here, all you need to be able to do is talk to people and you can get them to do it. You don't have to go there yourself.
Okay. Given the fact we have discussed the possibility of massive economic dislocation. We have talked about what AI can mean to mental health. We've talked about AI perhaps radically transforming issues of war and peace and foreign policy. Given all of these extraordinary concerns, why do you think there has not been more discussion about these issues?
I think one reason is because people don't really understand what's happening. So I see my mission is to educate people about what's happening and about how AI works. Very few people at present understand how it actually works. If you want to understand how it actually works, I did a podcast with a very good interviewer. This is self-advertisement, but you're one of those, a very good interviewer who extracted from me a very good explanation of how these neural nets actually work. And the interviewer was Jon Stewart who's a hero of mine. You should look at that because that'll tell you how they actually work roughly speaking in terms that a non-expert can understand. No equations. So let me, sorry I got distracted by my self-promotion.
All right, let me ask you this and this, you know, is, you're a scientist and not a politician but given all that we've talked about, what should I be doing, what should the Congress be doing, I hesitate to say what the president should be doing, not particularly relevant for this discussion, but what should a sane government be doing?
Okay, so there's some very simple things that should definitely be done. They won't answer all these problems, but even those aren't being done properly. The first thing is if you're going to release one of these big chatbots, you ought to do a lot of safety tests on it and you ought to be required by your government to report what safety tests you did and what the results were. And as time goes by and we get more experience, we can add to those safety tests.
Let me interrupt you. What do you mean by safety tests? What should a rational government be doing?
So, you take a chatbot and you say, 'Can I figure out how to trick it into telling me how to make a homemade bomb?' And the answer is you can. So, these chatbots, because they've been trained on everything on the web that's available, they know how to make nasty viruses. They know how to make homemade bombs. And after they've been trained, if you were to just ask them that question and you didn't do any further training, they would tell you. You then do further training where people try and get them to say how to make a bomb and then tell them, 'Don't do that. Don't answer that question.' That's called human reinforcement learning. Where the people ask them questions, say, 'That's a bad answer or that's a good answer.' It's very easy to overcome that or relatively easy to overcome that. Not nearly enough testing has been done on how to overcome that. So there was a very good bill, a very sensible bill, not very strict at all, proposed in California, SB 1047, that got through both houses and was vetoed by Gavin Newsom. Strangely, that just said you have to test them and you have to tell the government the results of the tests and if you don't you can be sued civilly by the attorney general. Even that failed. So that's just the minimum. There's another area where there has to be legislation, which is to do with these things telling you how to create nasty viruses. That's probably the most urgent threat. These things know how to create viruses and they can tell you how to create viruses. And they've got a sort of thin veneer telling them not to tell you. We need a lot of legislation about how it must not be possible to get them to tell you how to create nasty viruses. Also, during the Biden administration, they realized that if I can get the DNA sequence for a nasty virus, I can send it off to the cloud and they will send it back in a test tube. So, I don't actually need a wet lab. I just send it to the cloud and I get this nasty virus in the test tube. And at least they should check whether this sequence has a sequence for, for example, the spike protein of COVID. If it's got that sequence in, maybe they shouldn't make it. It turns out most of the companies don't check. Some of them do, but most of them don't. The Biden White House would have loved to have legislation that said that anybody who synthesizes these sequences on the web has to do serious checks for whether they're synthesizing a nasty virus. They figured out though that there was no point even proposing legislation because the Republicans wouldn't give Biden a win. Their calculation was the Republicans would rather Biden not get a win than protect us from lethal viruses. Right now, the other side of this is if a virus does get out there, you'd like to have good response to it. We've got someone who had a worm in his brain getting rid of the research on how to respond to it.
Right. Let me go back to a concern that I have which is in many ways above and beyond the whole discussion of AI. We are living in a moment in American history where we have more income and wealth inequality than we've ever had. You got one guy, Mr. Musk, owning more wealth, for example, than the bottom 52% of American households. You have more concentration of ownership than we've ever had. What does it mean? These guys are not dummies. And if they are investing many, many hundreds of billions of dollars in these technologies, yes, I think we can assume they're doing it for the money. But what does it mean for our society and the world when so few people have so much power? How does that impact? Will in fact government be able to regulate these guys or will they be in fact regulating government with their wealth and power?
So I think the US has a problem which I put down to the Supreme Court and judgments they've made that you can just buy politicians, not Bernie but the other ones, because Bernie gets his money from ordinary people. And there's no limit to how much you can contribute to politicians via these sort of super PACs that pretend to be independent. That means the rich can just buy the political system. I remember when I first got to the states as a postdoc in 1978, there was a US government organization that protected consumers that said that used car dealers should be required to tell you about a fault in the car if they had used that fault in the car to buy it cheap from the previous owner. Now, the Used Car Dealers of America didn't like that law, and they paid every senator $10,000, 100 senators, that's just a million dollars, and the Senate voted against it. That just totally shocked me that you could buy the Senate for a million dollars. So, I think our main problem is that the rich have much too much power and pay much too little in taxes. I just want to make one comment about taxes. It's a kind of a joke. When I moved to Canada, I moved to Canada, then I moved to Britain, then I came back to Canada and I must have used the mic for doing that. So my next door neighbor was a politician and he said, 'Why did you come back to Canada?' And I said, 'Because taxes are higher here.' And he said, 'Yes, taxes are too high and my government, our government has reduced them three times already and we're going to reduce them again.' And I said, 'No.' I said, 'Because taxes are higher here.' And he said, 'Yes, I agree they're too high.' He could not comprehend the idea that high taxes are good. All of the research that led to this revolution in AI was funded by university grants to universities. It was funded from taxpayer money. Almost all of Silicon Valley came out of federal grants to Stanford and Berkeley and places like that. Somehow the very rich and people like Murdoch have won the battle to say that taxes are bad. Taxes are good. This is like greed is good. Greed isn't good. Taxes are good. Taxes are what funds everything. Without taxes, we wouldn't have all the advanced technology we've had because nearly all that technology comes out of things funded by taxes in the first place. So I think I've had my little say now.
Okay. All right. I have exhausted my list of questions. So now if we can hear from the students that would be great.
Now that we are sufficiently terrified, here's what I'm going to ask guys. Let's, we're going to move to the questions as quickly as possible. Here's how this is going to work. We've got the two mics. One in the center aisle here, one in the center aisle in the balcony. When I point to you, you're up. Please tell us who you are, where you're from, what you're studying, and then please frame your question in the form of a question. All right, we good? Let's start in the balcony. Oh, hold on. Hold that mic a little bit closer. Is it on? Yeah. Good. All right. Let's, number six, please. Okay, now we're good, right? Okay, there we go.
Thank you both so much for being here tonight. I'm Lily Beth. I'm a first year in the undergraduate School of Foreign Service. I was wondering, while I think we can all agree that we have concerns over the future of AI and how it threatens the job market, I was wondering what you believe the potential positives of the future of AI are and if you think that it may potentially create new jobs in the job market and if so,
Okay, that's a great question because we've sort of left that out in this discussion. And if it was just all these nasty risks we've talked about, then the rational thing to do would be just stop developing AI now. But we can't do that. It's not like nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons, they're only good for destroying things. AI has a wonderful upside. It's going to make health care hugely better. It's going to make education hugely better. We know that a private tutor allows you to learn about twice as fast as a classroom. And AI is going to be even better than that. It's going to make a very good tutor because it's going to have seen millions of kids like you and know just what you don't understand. So that's why we're not going to stop it. It's going to be wonderful for lots of things. It's going to predict the weather better. It's going to, in almost any industry where you need to predict things, have better predictions and so it's going to make the industry more efficient. Just trivial things like how long a patient's going to need a hospital bed for. If you can predict that better, you can make the hospital beds go further. You can decide whether to discharge them so another patient can get that bed or whether that's a bad idea because they're likely to come back again if you discharge them too soon. It can optimize everything and make it more productive and that's great, but for the fact that it will replace a lot of jobs. But I think it's very important that we understand there's a huge upside to AI as well and in a decent society increasing productivity should be good if the wealth was shared equally between everybody that would be a great thing to do. In terms of creating new jobs, I don't believe it's going to create as many new jobs as it replaces. It'll create jobs like prompt engineer, how do you prompt this chatbot to get the best out of it. But I don't believe there'll be nearly as many new jobs created as it replaces. Although good economists like Daron Acemoglu aren't sure about this. They think maybe it will. So there's uncertainty here and one thing to bear in mind when discussing AI in the future is everything's hugely uncertain.
Thank you.
Thanks for the question here.
Hi, thank you both for being here. My name is Dia. I'm a senior in the college and I'm originally from the Mississippi Delta, which is a rural part of Mississippi. So, Mississippi has signed quite a few contracts with major companies like Amazon and Exxon to build AI data centers, funneling billions of dollars for economic development. This is more of a policy question. How do we balance this need for economic development, especially in rural America, with these energy, environmental concerns of citizens?
It's a real concern and I think as you know communities all over the country are rejecting these data centers for a couple of reasons. Number one, as often as not their electric bills are going to soar and communities in rural areas are saying why am I paying an increase in my electricity bill in order to lose my job. So they're rejecting that. And also as you indicate it's not just enormous consumption of electricity it's also consuming a great deal of water. So there are real environmental impacts associated with data centers that I think communities all over the country are responding and what we are seeing is many of these very large corporations are trying to bulldoze their way through and they're a lot more powerful than some local city council. So it is a real political issue right now. You're seeing governors in Virginia, for example, I think it was an issue in the campaign. We got to do something about rising electric rates because of these data centers. So from an environmental perspective, which we had not discussed, it is a very big issue.
I have a comment about that too. They should be building their data centers on Hudson Bay. On Hudson Bay, you could build more hydro power stations. There's still untapped rivers there. And the problem is you have to build the transmission lines, but if you put a data center next to a hydro power station, you don't need any transmission lines because the only thing you need to send out is information. And information doesn't require a lot of energy to send out. So, a natural thing to do is have a hydro plant on Hudson Bay with a data center next to it. And I had a long conversation with Trudeau about this and he was very interested in that, but it never happened.
Thank you.
All right. Back up to the balcony.
Thank you very much. I'm Luchana Valadaris. I'm a faculty here teaching at the School of Foreign Services, a course on AI and human rights in Latin America. And my question is on the international governance. Could you share any reflections of what would be an ideal governance model and if there are any limits that should be in place in your view, including on new technologies in the military domain which was a topic that you touched upon today. Thank you.
So, for a long time I've been against lethal autonomous weapons, that is weapons that decide who they should kill or maim by themselves. The US military says there will always be human oversight. But to begin with, they said that wouldn't happen. Then they said there'd always be human oversight. And what that means is there'll be oversight of the policy, but you have to make the decisions too fast. So, these things will be deciding who to kill and maim. And I thought it was just a clear-cut case that we should forbid that. We should have Geneva conventions against that, which probably wouldn't come into place till very nasty things had happened. I now think it's a bit more complicated, having talked to Eric Schmidt, who used to be the chairman of Google. He's much more right-wing than me, so we disagree on more or less everything. But, for example, he thinks Kissinger is a good guy and I think Kissinger is a bad guy. I like the Rolling Stone obituary for Kissinger. So he made me realize if you look at Ukraine now the Russians are using drones. Should the Ukrainians just say we're not going to use drones. We're not going to use drones that can drop grenades on people. It's more complicated. I mean it would be great if we could get international treaties. And we have got international treaties for chemical weapons that have basically worked. The Russians aren't using chemical weapons in Ukraine. A few people have broken those treaties. Saddam Hussein dropped chemical weapons on the Kurds. There's some evidence of Winston Churchill dropped chemical weapons on the Kurds. It always seems to be the Kurds it gets dropped on. But basically they've held and maybe we can get international treaties like that that'll hold for lethal autonomous weapons. But I think very nasty things have to happen first.
