Social media moved very quickly, probably a bit slower than this will. And you know, we’ve seen the harms writ large as a consequence. So I think it’s a really important moment, and whoever will be sitting in No. 10 for that period of time needs to be, make sure that they’ve got their eyes on it.
But what to you is the most frightening thing that is.
Happening? I think the most frightening is that the industry is concentrated around a few very big companies, right? And we’ve known in history that concentrations of power, whether it’s political power or business power, never serves the rest of us well in the long term. And these large companies may compete with each other, they may even compete with each other on the dimensions that you talked about, they may say, well, ours is more truthful or ours is less discriminatory. At the end, they are competing simply to be more powerful than each other. To then do what powerful companies, whether it’s Standard Oil in America from 150 years ago or any other very large powerful business. What they will do, which will be to skew the rules, skew the systems in their favor. And you know, you don’t need any technology insight to know that. You just need to be a student of history, which is too much unchecked power ends up in with bad outcome. So that’s the thing that I do worry about.
Standard Oil or whatever it was in the past, antitrust legislation. Their power built up over decades, and then legislators had some years to work out what to do about it. But here in this exponential right world, this comes very quickly. Politicians take a couple of years to notice what has happened, then civil servants take a couple of years to advise them what to do, then that’s all done wrong. And the first player at about six or seven years later, you get some working body of regular by then.
Right?
It’s all changed and competition law and business is set up in a particular way, but not really for a world in which businesses change so quickly. So for politicians, this is going to be an enormous problem, isn’t it’s already an enormous.
It is an enormous problem and it is really present. So the next parliament, whenever it starts, we, that five year period will be critical period where AI will go everywhere. And the reason I say it will go everywhere is that if you look at how long it takes digital technologies to go from the niches to the mainstream, it’s typically between about seven and 10 or 12 years. I mean, the iPhone replaced the old Nokia phone with buttons in about 7 years. And lots of data shows that is the amount of time this process will take. We’ve made arguments that AI is moving faster, and I think it is moving faster than something like the iPhone. So 5 years is long enough for us to go from a few of us nibbling around the edges of ChatGPT to this being used by every company and by every part of the public services and by every Britain.
And, and so that’s the period of time in which we have to get to grips with these issues and be proactive if about we’re intervene, intervening when we need to. We didn’t do this with social media. Not, not, neither did the public get engaged nor did government get engaged. Social media moved very quickly, probably a bit slower than this will. And, you know, we’ve seen the harms writ large as a consequence. So I think it’s a really important moment. And whoever will be sitting in No. 10 for that period of time needs to be, make sure that they’ve got their eyes on it.