AI firms call for countries to beef up their cyber defences... against AI

**Ed Butler** (0:01)
Are we ready for the AI era?

**Bill Gates** (0:04)
AI's ability to replace and exceed human cognition will usher in one of the most turbulent eras in history.

**Ed Butler** (0:12)
If Bill Gates is concerned, shouldn't we all be?

**Geoffrey Hinton** (0:15)
We're creating a new kind of being. It's going to be smarter than us.
And unless it really cares a lot about us, we're in real trouble.

**Ed Butler** (0:24)
The future of AI on World Business Report from the BBC World Service. Yes, I'm Ed Butler and today we're going to be hearing not just from the founder of Microsoft, but also the so-called godfather of AI himself, Nobel laureate Jeffrey Hinton, about the increasingly noisy chorus of concern over where this brave new AI world is leading us. Also to come why FIFA president Gianni Infantino could just could be facing criminal charges and we're sipping some very, very expensive whisky.
So then a group of 100 tech firms today, including Microsoft, Google, Anthropic and OpenAI, have signed an open letter calling on countries and organisations around the world to beef up their cyber defences. This before artificial intelligence grows so powerful, it might be able to override them. These warnings come also from major players like Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, who continues to sound on about the wider risks of artificial intelligence.

**Bill Gates** (1:37)
AI's ability to replace and exceed human cognition will usher in one of the most turbulent eras in history. Many jobs will disappear.
At the same time, AI will accelerate innovation in the world's toughest technical challenges, providing reliable clean energy for everyone, avoiding climate change, growing enough food, stopping diseases, improving education. If we manage the transition well, the good will vastly outweigh the bad. But I worry that we aren't preparing. There's no plan to ease the entry into the AI era, and not even a plan to have a plan.

**Ed Butler** (2:19)
The words of Bill Gates posting on his own website today. Well, one man with a strong view on this is Geoffrey Hinton. He's a former vice president at Google, now a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Toronto.
And he's often called the godfather of AI for his foundational discoveries on machine learning. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in 2024 I asked him whether he shared Bill Gates' concerns.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (2:44)
There's lots of bad things you can do with AI, like cyberattacks, creating nasty new biological viruses, fake videos for corrupting elections and many more. One of the biggest being mass unemployment caused by AIs taking people's jobs.

**Ed Butler** (3:01)
It's gigantic, isn't it? I mean, as you say, you've outlined things from so many different spheres of our lives.
It's going to be very hard to put that into a box of legislation, isn't it? To even begin to curb those risks.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (3:18)
Yes, it's very difficult. You can't just make one regulation that solves all the problems. There are possible regulations to deal with many of the risks from bad actors.
But one big problem we have at present is that the lobbyists for the big tech companies are trying to convince people, particularly people who make decisions, that AI is kind of like a car. And if we put on the brakes, China is going to win. That's what they keep saying.
Well, that is a model they're trying to sell to you that's just wrong. A much better model is innovation is indeed the accelerator, but regulation is the steering wheel. And what they want you to do is make a very fast car with no steering wheel, and that doesn't seem like a good idea.

**Ed Butler** (3:58)
It's interesting you mentioned the big tech companies. There was a letter today from Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, Open AI, among others, specifically warning about the cybersecurity risks of AI, that essentially it will simply be able to decode our toughest cyber walls and then we'll all be vulnerable, and that basically agreed regulation is required on that area.
So I suppose whilst they may be calling for, you know, free reign to develop as many data centers as they can and their chips and so on, there is also a counter pressure that government regulation and guardrails are needed simultaneously.

**Geoffrey Hinton** (4:39)
Yes, cyber is just one of the risks. They realize that's a very urgent risk and that's going to affect them a lot. So they want to do something about that now, but there's many other risks like the mass unemployment that they know about and they're basically keeping quiet about.

**Ed Butler** (4:54)
So let's talk about mass unemployment. What do you do there?