Memia Podcasts Ben Reid

I enjoyed talking with RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan yesterday afternoon on the implications of AI-generated music for copyright and the ambient acceleration of generative AI which we are currently witnessing.
You can listen to the interview online at RNZ here (in a twist of irony, “this audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions” 🤣) or listen using the podcast button above (not quite so sensitive here…)
Also writeup on RNZ here, excerpted below:
Artificial-intelligence-generated music will be the norm sooner than we think, says an expert technology futurist.
Last week, an AI went big on the internet. The two-minute track 'Heart On My Sleeve' features AI-created vocals sounding like megastars Drake and The Weeknd.
It has quickly been pulled from streaming services by the artists' label for breaching copyright.
This audio is not downloadable due to copyright restrictions.
'Heart On My Sleeve' has been taken down from Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal and being removed from TikTok and YouTube, but some versions remain available.
Publishers Universal Music Group said the song violated copyright law.
In a statement to music industry trade magazine Billboard, Universal said "platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists."
Technology futurist and author of the Memia newsletter Ben Reid talked to Jesse Mulligan about the bigger issues at play here.
"We've seen this explosion of generative AI tools in the last few months" such as ChatGPT and image emulator DALL-E, Reid said, "so yeah, text to music is the next one".
"The tools to synthesise voices are developing really quickly ... sometimes sort of called DeepFakes, where you can train an AI model to replicate someone's voice, speech patterns, intonation, and then you can give it a script to speak.
"We're seeing this being applied in the commercial space now."
The sweeping changes that AI technology will create are just beginning, with some frightened and some optimistic.
"This a generational change, a paradigm change in terms of what the technology enables.
"We've moved from an era where music is relatively scarce and is now completely abundant. ... The ability now is you can create hours and hours of AI-generated music with very little effort.
"The question around copyright is what are these AI models trained on originally? Is it copyrighted material that has been fed into the models?
"The music publishers, this is their business model, and they are looking to protect the legal rights from copyright."
"I'm not a lawyer, but these questions have been raised before," Reid noted, such as back in the early 2000s when Google attempted to scan and upload every book in the world, causing concern from authors' guilds.
That case ultimately went to the US Supreme Court, which found it fair use for Google to put the material online.
The rapid speed of technology development makes it hard for the legal system to keep up, Reid said.
"Regulation tends to trail innovation in tech by quite a degree.
"My sense would be by the time this legal process has gone through the courts - and it may take years and years and years, and lawyers will make a lot of money out of it - by that time, my hunch is you're going to find AI models being trained on AI-generated content and there's actually no real traceability back to any original copyrighted content at all.
"My feeling for the future is that we may see a future where all music is AI-generated and there's this complete democratisation of the ability to create, consume and completely personalise music streams."
But does that take away any personality and human element in music?
Reid said it is possible that if you have an endless procession of AI avatars and AI musicians, each with a completely crafted personal story, we might not be able to tell the difference.
"Why would you pick Ed Sheeran over your favourite personalised selection?"
As the AI revolut

For those who missed it, here is the recording of the recent UC Business School MBA Thought Leadership panel event on 30th March featuring Woolworths NZ GM Data & Analytics Kari Jones, Westland Milk Head of Digital Improvement Gareth Mitchell and myself, moderated by UC MBA Programme Director Elsamari Botha.
We had a 90-minute(!) thought-provoking discussion on the vast topic of AI just 2 weeks after OpenAI released GPT-4, focusing on the latest developments in generative AI such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, MidJourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and many more... and in particular their impacts for Aotearoa New Zealand businesses and the economy.
Key takeaways for me:1. Technology continues to accelerate and AI is now speeding development of even more software and AI. As Gareth said: "the bullet train is leaving the station"... very little time left to get on board. The huge potential benefits are exciting... but also with some scary downsides!2. Aotearoa's businesses need to engage with AI and technology generally: as Kari said, get into the practice of lots of rapid, "micro innovation" experiments with new tech and create a culture of curiosity in your organisation!3. In particular, the impact on work and jobs is going to be profound: every service industry role from administration to software development will be (a) boosted short term with a massive productivity dividend from generative AI tools but (b) potentially fully automated soon after.Whether enough people can re-skill quickly enough before the new skills are themselves automated is unclear right now. We agreed with calls to start working on what a "just transition" to a post-AI economy might look like - including policies such as Universal Basic Income, shortened work weeks and lifelong learning opportunities.4. The tsunami of AI-generated content, particularly deepfakes, is just around the corner. This may fundamentally break collective societal narratives, creating "fractured realities".5. Internationally, deployment decisions and control of these powerful new AI technologies is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people and companies, almost exclusively in the US and Chinese tech sectors. International governance mechanisms are needed. (But recent calls for a moratorium on development are unlikely to result in any meaningful outcomes...) Fundamentally for Aotearoa, the country has been sleepwalking into becoming a net "technology taker" and this likely has long term implications for national sovereignty ...my assertion is that greater investment and international collaboration is required to ensure alternative choices are available (likely open source technology platforms).6. We should expect more from New Zealand's businesses and government to better anticipate future technology-driven change: (a) building foresight and scenario planning capabilities and (b) investing in curiosity and innovation to have any chance of skin in the game in future.Listen to the audio above or watch the recording below online.
Many thanks to Elsamari, the team at UC Business School and the highly engaged audience for producing an event full of humour, provocation and insight!


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Memia’s Ben Reid speaking with Melbourne 88.3 Southern FM's Sandra Spencer on the latest emerging technology news to how it affects our lives in the future.


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I'm delighted to share another (occasional!) Memia podcast - a series of conversations with New Zealanders doing amazing work interpreting and shaping the future.
In this episode I speak with Matt Boyd, director of New Zealand-based firm Adapt Research - Matt is one of Aotearoa’s leading experts focusing on the *BIG Questions* around catastrophic and existential risks for humanity.
In this conversation we spend just over an hour discussing these major risks: ranging through new pandemics, asteroid impacts, nuclear winters and all the way to unaligned artificial intelligence. We also go into the challenges of making this relevant for Aotearoa and Matt's proposals to establish a new government role - a Parliamentary Commissioner for extreme risks.
Matt is a regular correspondent of mine when I’m writing the Memia newsletter and we have also worked together on a few research projects, most notably Te Kahui Atamai Iahiko o Aotearoa / AI Forum NZ’s series of research reports on national AI policy and AI in Health back in 2019.
I really value Matt's insights on some of the biggest questions facing humanity today — and by extension all of us living here in Aotearoa — I hope you enjoy the conversation!
Listen to the audio-only podcast above or watch the whole recording on YouTube here:
Matt’s bio
Originally medically trained, Matt Boyd completed his PhD in Philosophy from Victoria University of Wellington, with his thesis titled: "As We Build our World We Build our Minds: The Causal Role of Technology in the Development and Evolution of Human Psychological Traits".
He's since built a career as an independent researcher spanning academic, public and private sectors. For the last five years Matt's research has attempted to understand and help reduce the largest threats to humanity, global catastrophic and existential risks.
Contact Matt
Website: https://www.adaptresearchwriting.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattboydresearchcontractor/
Twitter: @matt_adapt
Episode Links
Mentioned during the podcast:
* Toby Ord book: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
* Neal Stephenson novel: Fall; or Dodge in Hell
* Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)
* Kim Stanley Robinson novels: Mars Trilogy
* Neal Stephenson novel: Seveneves
* Peter Gluckman proposal (Auditor General): Uncertain but inevitable: The expert-policy-political nexus and high-impact risks
* Centre for Effective Altruism
* Te Puna Matatini research on parliament protests disinformation, RNZ Interview with study co-author Sanjana Hattotuwa: Disinformation 'super spreaders' involved in Parliament protest
* Web3 docs and email service: Skiff
Also further relevant reading just out:
* University of Cambridge Centre for Existential Risk: Military Artificial Intelligence as Contributor to Global Catastrophic Risk
Matt's writing:
* Website & blog: https://adaptresearchwriting.com/
* Paper mentioned: (with Nick Wilson) recent recommendation for a Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risk: Anticipatory Governance for Preventing and Mitigating Catastrophic and Existential Risks
Podcast outline:
Recorded: May 18th, 2022
01:28 Matt's career progression
04:10 What are the top 10 existential risks facing humanity in 2022?
07:04 Risks and impacts of nuclear winter
10:52 Environmental risks and ecological collapse
12:32 Ecological resilience theory
14:00 Eocene extinction event
15:02 Asteroid impacts
15:30 Becoming an interplanetary species
16:50 Matt's current work - pandemic planning
20:16 Pandemic border closures -"Hermit Kingdom" strategy?
22:50 Island refuges
28:30 Aotearoa government and managing national risks
31:40 Proposal for a Parliamentary Commissioner for extreme risks
35:00 Looking after the interests of future generations
37:00 The Effective Altruism movement / ITN Framework
40:00 "Moral cluelessness"
41:30 "Homo Capitalus"
43:30 S-Risks - intense future suffering
43:50 Prepping
48:15 Unaligned AI / killer robots / evolutionary equ

Kia ora,
I’m thrilled to share this recent podcast conversation with UK-based New Zealander Lyndon Burford, a global expert on nuclear deterrence and disarmament.
As Lyndon and I discuss in depth during the the podcast, the whole question of imminent nuclear war never really went away - despite the end of the Cold War. Now, with 9 nuclear-armed states, more advanced missile technologies, climate change creating global geostrategic tensions and increased bellicosity between the US and China, India and Pakistan, arguably the risk of a catastrophic nuclear war - and ensuing nuclear winter - is the highest it has ever been.
And yet hardly anyone is talking about it…
This is a frank, eye-opening, in-depth discussion of the current global nuclear risks - raising plenty of significant implications for Aotearoa’s international foreign policy role as one of the few states in the world where nuclear weapons are outlawed.
Please feel free to get in touch with your thoughts and/or add your comments below to develop the debate further.
ngā mihi
Ben
Lyndon’s bio:
Lyndon Burford is a Visiting Research Associate at the King's College London Centre for Science and Security Studies (CSSS), where he studies the politics, technologies and theories of nuclear disarmament, deterrence, arms control and risk. Lyndon is also a blockchain adviser on the New Technologies for Peace working group, part of the Vatican’s COVID-19 Commission.
Lyndon’s PhD thesis looked at the relationship between national identity and nuclear disarmament policy in Canada and New Zealand, and he was an advisor to the New Zealand delegation at the 2015 Non Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.
Lyndon has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Auckland, an MA in Political Science from the University of Canterbury (NZ), and a BA in Russian Studies from the University of Otago. In addition to blockchain and nuclear policy work, Lyndon is passionate about film, having studied film history and theory. He has worked on studio films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the BBC’s Lost World and has co-produced several short documentaries and educational videos.
Episode links:
Mentioned during the podcast:
* Lyndon Burford on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lyndon-burford/
* Lyndon Burford, Could Blockchain Technology Help Advance Nuclear Disarmament? Medium / International Affairs blog, February 19, 2021.
* Lyndon Burford, “The Trust Machine: Blockchain in Nuclear Disarmament and Arms Control Verification,” London, UK: Centre for Science & Security Studies, King’s College London, October 2020.
* Open letter to the Prime Minister: Threats to New Zealand’s security, sovereignty and national interests due to inadequate regulatory oversight of space-launch activities from New Zealand, March 5, 2021.
* Ollie Neas, “NZ Rocket Launches May Breach Nuclear-Free Laws, Say Peace Groups,” The Spinoff, March 9, 2021.
* How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet, Nature, 2020
* Vasili Arkhipov - Wikipedia
* Revealed: Jacinda Ardern warned twice Rocket Lab's launches could break Nuclear Free Law - Newshub
* Rocket Lab Monitor
* Introducing the Celo Climate Collective
* The Economist: The People's Panopticon
* Neflix movie: Coded Bias
Podcast outline:
1:00 Why is nuclear disarmament important in 2021?
1:10 If you care about climate change and ecological collapse, you should care about nuclear weapons
2:40 IPCC climate modeling applied to nuclear war: 1-2 billion deaths?
4:40 Climate change actually making nuclear war more likely
06:08 History of nuclear conflict - collapse of Soviet Union and end of the Cold War
08:00 The myth of nuclear deterrence in the modern multipolar world
10:56 AI and autonomous weapons
14:00 Cuban missile crisis / Vasili Arkhipov
17:25 Impact of academic research of nuclear archives
18:24 Current state of play - 9 nuclear armed states
19:40 Nuclear arms and the question of money
21:00 The permanent wa

Kia ora,
For a while now I’ve been talking about recording a Memia podcast series, conversations with people around Aotearoa doing amazing work in technology and innovation. Here’s the first episode, I hope you enjoy!
Last week I recorded this fascinating conversation with Aotearoa biotech entrepreneur Rachel Kelly, who is working to reimagine the future of personal health and bioaugmented intelligence. We had a wide ranging discussion spanning topics around extending healthspan, the latest wearables and bio-augmentation technologies, the importance of sleep and ultimately “accelerating the ability for organic and inorganic intelligence to work symbiotically to their fullest potential”. Fascinating stuff.
Rachel’s bio:
Rachel is a scientist, strategist, high-tech product developer and commercialisation professional who has spent the last 20 years in the science and technology sector. After spending 9 years in California working within biotechnology and high-tech manufacturing, she returned to New Zealand in 2014 and has been heavily involved in the Aotearoa technology ecosystem ever since.
Rachel has worked with award-winning and innovative tech startups including CoHired and Nyriad. She led Gallagher's Enterprise Security division as Chief Product Officer, and is currently co-owner of Taylored Health & Performance, a holistic, science-backed health hub and co-CEO of Taylored Technologies, a new biotech startup leveraging advanced technologies to unlock the health and potential of global leaders and athletes.
When she’s not building startups, Rachel has been was a co-founder of the Waikato technology cluster, former Deputy Chair of NZTech, former elected member on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Forum NZ Executive Council and is currently a Ministerial Advisor on the Digital Council of Aotearoa New Zealand and Board Member at Callaghan Innovation.
Episode links:
Items mentioned during the podcast:
* Rachel LinkedIn Bio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelkellynz/
* Theranos Podcast: “The Dropout” by ABC https://abcaudio.com/podcasts/the-dropout/
* Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_Trilogy
* Lex Fridman podcast: https://lexfridman.com/podcast/
* Project Otto website: https://projectotto.io
* Project Otto contact: hello@projectotto.io
Podcast outline:
* Rachel bio: 0:40
* Taylored Health 6:00
* Project Otto 8:55
* Healthspan 12:05
* Epigenetics - what is the Horvath Clock? 15:02
* Brain computer interfaces - Bryan Johnson / Kernel 15:55
* Sleep patterns / REM, deep sleep, circadian rhythms 17:40
* Sleep monitoring headband devices 21:30
* Project Otto data model: building algorithms and “MVT” (minimum viable truth”) 24:30
* Life extension: “For every 2 weeks you’re alive, you gain years of your life” 26:00
* Whole health: four pillars - “how you think, live, eat, move…in that order”. 28:00
* Technologies: CRISPR, machine learning, Alphafold 2, mRNA 29:00
* Water, organic chemistry and quantum physics 32:00
* The Virome 33:05
* Taylored Tech 500 year vision: “Accelerating the ability for organic and inorganic intelligence to work symbiotically to their fullest potential” 37:05
* Cyborgs, BCIs and quantum computing advances: building the “AI Placenta” 38:55
* Accessibility and ethics - who gets this tech first? 45:05
* Looking at 900,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNIPs”) 49:00
Video recording:
You can listen to MP3 audio above or watch the recording on Youtube:




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