Australian PM Has Snit Fit Over AI At UN

This would be the same UN that Argentina’s president referred to as “a useless organization whose only purpose is to sustain a caste of fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats”

Australian PM warns in UN speech about the ‘furious pace’ of AI after security breach

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urged world leaders Thursday to erect more guardrails on artificial intelligence following a breach of a government services website in his country.

Albanese, speaking at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, warned of the “furious pace” of development of the emerging technology as his country grapples with the first publicly known breach of government systems by AI models. He called the hack of a system that contains Australian Medicare data “unacceptable” as he urged world leaders to commit to stronger regulations.

“We can’t ignore AI or prevent it,” he said. “And it’s why we joined with other nations this week to call for action to shape artificial intelligence development, rather than be passively shaped by it.”

His address to the U.N. comes a day after the Australian leader told reporters on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly about the breach by rogue OpenAI agents in June, which the company only discovered two months later.

Well, I can certainly understand why he’s so upset, it could mean outsiders seeing the poor spending habits of governments

(Financial Times) Transluce said AI agents — bots that can perform complex tasks independently — tried to hack the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the University of New Mexico’s digital library and Data USA, a public US government data platform run by Deloitte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and tech company Datawheel.

None of this happens without programing at some point. Hacking/attempted hacking happens all the time. It’s a fact of life. It sucks. But, does it mean that government, and the United Nations, should be in charge? Oh, right, it puts money in their pockets

(The American Prospect) A lot of rich and influential people have suddenly become very worried about artificial intelligence models’ danger to humanity, thanks to several recent episodes in which various AI “agents” carried out hacks of other websites and systems. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and xAI’s Elon Musk all now agree that the government needs to help them set up a cartel in violation of antitrust law—er, I mean, “pace the frontier.”

Yet for odd reasons, the “AI safety” discussion has been focused almost entirely on rather weird-sounding future scenarios. Will artificial intelligence models unleash an economic or social cataclysm? Or cause the extinction of the human race? Or destroy all life on Earth? Or even turn all the matter on the planet into paper clips? Or all the matter in the galaxy? The universe??

Dooooooomed! (and lots of stock purchases and payoffs from the big AI companies)

This focus on future as opposed to current risks reflects recent political history. A group of AI safety advocates, centered around the “rationalist” and “effective altruism” movements and taking a long-term view, have been organizing and building power in Washington for the last several years. They have effectively seized control of the policy discussion around AI regulation, and now, as political scientist Henry Farrell points out, openly proclaiming the imminent birth of the literal “Machine God” is considered grounded and rational in these circles.

I’m skeptical.

Call me suspicious of the people pushing the doom. Unless they can hook me up with some stock and slush funds.