Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Dr J Robert Oppenheimer was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb that hastened the end of the Second World War. In the post Cold War period, he was very much perturbed by the fruits of his genius and did not support the development of the hydrogen bomb. He was a chain-smoking theoretical physicist and a genius.

After receiving formal approval from President Roosevelt on 28 December 1942, the Manhattan Project developed into a massive undertaking that spread across the United States. With over 30 project sites and over 100,000 workers, the Manhattan Project came to cost approximately $2.2 billion. Even though encompassing such a massive scale, the project largely remained a secret and many people working on the construction of the atomic bomb did not fully know the purpose behind their jobs.

On 16 July 1945, Oppenheimer was present at the first explosion of an atomic bomb, the Trinity test. Despite its Christian religious moniker, Oppenheimer quoted another religious text. He quoted Vishnu from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita:

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Vishnu is the supreme being who creates, protects and transforms the universe, and the development of the atomic bomb did change the future of the planet, but it had guard rails.

The development of artificial intelligence does not have these 'impediments'. Computer programs design better computer programs with a greater cognitive capacity and a feigned empathy that the programmer who planted the initial seed would have failed to comprehend. This is today's Oppenheimer dilemma. This week another genius, Geoffrey Hinton, 75, quit to speak freely about the dangers of AI and, in part, regrets his contribution to the field. He was brought on by Google a decade ago to help develop the company's AI technology, and the approach he pioneered led the way for current systems such as ChatGPT. He was concerned about the existential risk of what happens when these things get more intelligent than us. Hinton concluded:

I've come to the conclusion that the kind of intelligence we're developing is very different from the intelligence we have.

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So it's as if you had 10,000 people and whenever one person learnt something, everybody automatically knew it. And that's how these chatbots can know so much more than any one person.

So am I worried about the Terminator or cyborgs? No. But I do not deny for one second the malicious intent of people with nefarious motives. What I am more immediately concerned about is whether companies will use this technology to replace most of the jobs done by any person working at any keyboard attached to any computer in any field. People much smarter than I could possibly comprehend have this clearly in mind. We have developed a workforce that is based around the technology of the keyboard, and now the person who sits behind it may be old technology. The Trinity test site for AI does not require an isolated site in a desert in New Mexico. You are the test site, and the time is now. Any problems will be corrected and perfected by the same AI. There is just too much money to be made for this precarious scenario of your children's future not to become their reality.

I believe that it is fundamental that this parliament really understand some of the challenges that are before us. These should be concerns shared by both sides of the House. It is better that we try to deal with these issues now—although I must admit that I think the cat is already well and truly out of the bag—than to try and manage it at a later stage. We should take as a clarion call how those especially in the United States have raised concerns about this. These are people on all sides of the political fence and they're people who are vastly more exemplary in their understanding of this than I could ever possibly be. If we don't act, if we just sit back and wait for this problem to arrive on us, I think we'd be being really foolish. What's more, I think we could. There's always a chance. Whenever there's a chance, that's the time you do something about it; not when it's an actuality, but when there's a chance. With AI, it has most certainly become apparent that there's a chance of an incredibly dark scenario that could become the fate of all of us if we don't mange this problem right now.