SXSW Sydney ends with AI optimism – from the corporate promoting cures to the ache they’re inflicting

I’m personally pro-tech and use AI every single day. I’m genuinely excited by progressive instruments that develop 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 sooner, get bigger, study 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 world affairs (ie. geopolitical threat 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 when you don’t adapt, that’s on you.

Listed here are the largest takeaways — and why I’m not absolutely shopping for the story after we can design higher world floor up from the start.

Lehane talked about “democratising AI,” but OpenAI’s fashions are educated on the work of thousands and 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 obvious: take first, apologise later.

He assured the viewers that OpenAI will create extra new jobs, not destroy them — that each technological leap has executed so.

“To not be Pollyannaish,” he added, earlier than acknowledging that, sure, some folks will be displaced. However to not fear, there will probably be new “marketplaces” for coaching, certifications, and “AI literacy.”

In different phrases, the identical firm that disrupted your business will now promote you the toolkit to outlive in it.

It’s a intelligent sleight of hand — an ethical outsourcing. Governments should resolve tips on how to regulate. Societies should adapt. Employees should retrain.

OpenAI simply builds the instruments. And if the world struggles to catch up, properly, that’s not their fault.

Lehane’s optimism stretched 25 years into the long run.

By then, he stated, AI could have cured most cancers, solved training, and powered abundance.

Everybody will “reside the nice life.”

However there’s a darker query lurking beneath that imaginative and prescient: what occurs when the following technology now not learns how to do issues? When each act of creation, restore, or discovery is diminished to a voice command or a immediate?

Will we nonetheless know tips on how to construct, educate, or write, or will these expertise quietly vanish, outsourced to invisible methods 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 up to now, humanity hasn’t been main; it’s been reacting.

The roles are already disappearing. The abilities hole is widening. The methods are studying sooner than the folks they’re alleged 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 impression, all he bought was hope.

When he closed with “we hope the world will get higher,” 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 true query just isn’t what AI will create — however what it can take alongside the way in which.

• George Hedon is the founding father of Pause Fest and the Pause Awards.