I’m personally pro-tech and use AI daily. I’m genuinely excited by progressive instruments that increase what creators and companies can do.
However the tempo of what’s occurring — and how it’s being rolled out — has been eye-jarring: creators sidelined, copyright murky at greatest, implementation racing forward of consent.
Proper now it looks like a land-grab: who can transfer quicker, get bigger, be taught extra, prepare extra — too usually at society’s expense.
That’s the backdrop to the ultimate keynote at SXSW Sydney 2025, a fireplace interview the place OpenAI’s chief of worldwide affairs (ie. geopolitical danger administration boss), Chris Lehane, was interviewed by the AFR’s Paul Smith.
Lehane provided a refined imaginative and prescient of “the age of intelligence” and a greater world in 25 years. The subtext: historical past reveals every revolution trumps the final, so adaptation is everybody’s duty — and for those who don’t adapt, that’s on you.
Listed below are the most important takeaways — and why I’m not absolutely shopping for the story once we can design higher world floor up from the start.
OpenAI’s Chris Lehane
Lehane talked about “democratising AI,” but OpenAI’s fashions are educated on the work of hundreds of thousands of creators with out consent — writers, designers, journalists, musicians — whose expertise are actually quietly being automated, their livelihoods eroded. The corporate frames this as a mistake, or a matter of authorized interpretation.
The sample is evident: take first, apologise later.
He assured the viewers that OpenAI will create extra new jobs, not destroy them — that each technological leap has finished so.
“Not to be Pollyannaish,” he added, earlier than acknowledging that, sure, some folks will be displaced. However to not fear, there can be new “marketplaces” for coaching, certifications, and “AI literacy.”
In different phrases, the identical firm that disrupted your trade will now promote you the toolkit to outlive in it.
It’s a intelligent sleight of hand — an ethical outsourcing. Governments should resolve the best way to regulate. Societies should adapt. Employees should retrain.
OpenAI simply builds the instruments. And if the world struggles to catch up, nicely, that’s not their fault.
Lehane’s optimism stretched 25 years into the long run.
By then, he stated, AI can have cured most cancers, solved training, and powered abundance.
Everybody will “live the good life.”
However there’s a darker query lurking beneath that imaginative and prescient: what occurs when the following era now not learns how to do issues? When each act of creation, restore, or discovery is decreased to a voice command or a immediate?
Will we nonetheless know the best way to construct, educate, or write, or will these expertise quietly vanish, outsourced to invisible techniques we now not perceive? If AI turns into the hand that paints, the voice that sings, the thoughts that solves — what, then, turns into of ours?
Lehane spoke of human-led design, of placing folks on the centre of this transformation. However thus far, humanity hasn’t been main; it’s been reacting.
The roles are already disappearing. The talents hole is widening. The techniques are studying quicker than the folks they’re purported to serve.
Because the lights dimmed, the group clapped and laughed, not out of awe, however irony. After Smith’s push for actual solutions on copyright and AI’s influence, all he received was hope.
When he closed with “we hope the world will get better,” the room knew that was all they’d been given.
OpenAI’s imaginative and prescient guarantees a greater world — if we simply belief them, if we simply sustain. But each revolution has its price. And earlier than we let one other wave of “innovation” wash over us, maybe the actual query just isn’t what AI will create — however what it’s going to take alongside the way in which.
George Hedon is the founding father of Pause Fest and the Pause Awards.
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