♪ Christiane: Hello, everyone, and welcome to "Amanpour & Company."

Here's what's coming up.

A scaled-back victory day parade in Moscow as Putin tries to portray Russia as the real victim of this war.

A former Russian politician joins me on how to counter Putin's propaganda.

And the Swiss climate grannies trying to save the world.

I speak to Elizabeth Stern and a lawyer about taking their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

>> It's possible that there's no way we'll control the superintelligence.

Christiane: Is artificial intelligence an even greater threat to our existence?

The godfather of A.I.

says it is.

We talk about sounding the alarm.

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Christiane: Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

Victory day in Russia has long been one of the most important dates in president Putin's calendar, a chance to show off the Kremlin's military might while commemorating the day the Soviet Union defeated Germany in World War II.

But this year, scaled back, no flight pass and with only one tank displayed.

It exposed the strain the war in Ukraine is taking but Putin delivered a defiant speech, saying that Russia is the real victim of its war.

>> The Ukrainian nation has become hostage to a coup, which led to a criminal regime led by its Western masters.

It has become a pawn to their selfish plan.

Christiane: Recently the Kremlin updated its foreign policy doctrine to label the United States as the main threat facing Russia.

And the U.S. is set to announce a $1.2 billion aid package to Ukraine.

Meanwhile the barrage of missiles hasn't let up in Ukraine.

You can see the smoke trails over the skies of Kyiv, where an official said all of the missiles were shot down.

This, a day after Russia launched its biggest drone swarm yet.

Reporter: As dusk falls, the sky is lit in a duel.

All they can do here to stay alive is read the horizon.

[gunfire] >> Some of it perhaps further south into occupied areas a week earlier but so much of it also very close.

[explosions] >> Dawn is often jarring.

We hear a jet overhead.

The slowly building, grating sound of damage moving towards you.

[explosion] >> A missile, a half million dollar K.H., 31 Ukrainian officials later say, lands just 700 yards away.

Another blast follows.

[explosion] Jet entrails or anti-aircraft fire set to shape a Z in the air, the symbol of Russia's invasion.

It is soon gone.

The damage it leaves isn't.

This is where it hit, or missed.

Down here you can get a feeling of just how massively brutal Russian firepower can be and also how indiscriminate.

You're left wondering where the obvious military target is.

At the end of this road is one of the towns Russia has said it is evacuating.

We are just one mile from Russian frontline positions here, a world torn apart as Moscow tries to hold Ukraine back.

No more than 10 miles in that direction respect first towns that Russian occupying forces say they're going to be evacuating because of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The last town really held by Ukraine, absolutely battered and so few people left here, there's little need to evacuate.

Where there was once 3,000, there are 200 people trying to survive.

Caught in these wide-open spaces where a distant bang can suddenly alter life in an instant.

Christiane: Our next guest is putting all his efforts into countering Putin's propaganda.

He was once a member of the Russian state duma and now he's running a TV station aimed at Russia and he's even taken arms against his own country.

He's joining me now from Poland.

Illia, welcome back to the program.

You've been on our show shortly after the war started, after your nation invaded its neighbor, Ukraine and you've seen today the so-called victory day parade.

How do you analyze what it looked like?

It was seriously scaled back.

There have been headlines saying that it showed Russian weakness, not Russian strength.

How do you assess?

>> Indeed I think it's a significant scale back.

Just 45 minutes.

That's the shortest military parade of all times that were happening in Russia and there have been so many.

Vladimir Putin was obviously afraid of drama so he surrounded himself with hostages.

He took other readers of C.I.S.

countries to protect him because he was sure that Russian partners would not fire in the circumstances not to provoke a major international conflict and still he was afraid and also parading were not the diverse Russian military entities.

It was mostly perished in the field of war but some military students and some Cossacks, which were unseen before.

Christiane: Let's just dive into what you just said, that he was afraid of a drone attack and he had hostages and you say from other C.I.S.

countries, that is, the countries that broke away from the Soviet union and are now independent countries.

You said he was afraid of an attack by what, by -- you said Russian partisans?

Who is he afraid of?

>> As you have seen, on the third of May in the night, there was an attack on Kremlin's dome by two drones that were fired from the outskirts of Moscow and the source of this is Russian resistance and the reason for this attack was to actually force Vladimir Putin to cancel the parade altogether so that Russians would understand that the war is lost.

Christiane: Illia, stop for one second.

It's really important.

I'm really interested in your sourcing on it because, as you know, the Kremlin blamed Ukraine.

They said it was a botched assassination attempt.

Obviously, Ukraine denies it.

But you have specific information.

How do you know it's Russian resistance?

>> Obviously Russia is providing a lot of fake news.

One of this is that the master minds for the Ukrainians were the Americans and it was them who were behind it.

But obviously, what kind of assassination you speak of is an attack on the dome of the main building in Kremlin.

First of all, nobody knows where Putin stays in particularly when he's there.

Secondly, he was not there.

And I know this because I was speaking to people who were preparing this attack a month ago and at that time they started preparing and we were discussing whether it's the right idea to do it on the ninth of May, and I was advising against it because I was saying that first of all, it puts civilians in danger, and, secondly, it's such a sacred day for Russia, it may cause the opposite results.

So they were trying to force Putin to cancel the parade altogether.

Christiane: So basically you're saying that you were involved in this drone attack or at least in talking to the people who did it.

That they're Russians.

Russian resistance.

So what is their full aim?

>> I would like to stress that I'm not taking the credit in organizing this fantastic attack, although I think it was a great show but definitely, yes, Russian resistance is growing.

It's behind many attacks already inside Russia.

There are at least a thousand of people who were involved in the resistance inside the country and it's not Ukrainians trying to stop the war.

And anti-war...exist.

They're doing their best to save the honor of their country because most of Russian opposition left the country and they resigned from the fight and these people are still fighting.

Christiane: OK, so the question is, then, because that's what everybody wants to know and you seem to be in touch with people there.

There still is, according to Lavada and others, which I know operate under strict...but seemingly overwhelming support for president Putin.

There still are people there in huge numbers who are going to fight for Putin and who are being recruited and who are answering the call.

What is the actual state of people's belief in this war?

Russian people?

>> You know, people who are going to war.

They fight not for Putin.

They are fighting for might because Putin puts all the country into complete misery and the majority of Russians are worse than even during Soviet Union times so they are struggle for their survival and they are taking whatever money is there without thinking what does it mean to actually go and fight against such close friends -- former friends and former brothers and sisters of Ukraine.

So that's awful but it is a fact.

But if we look inside and look at what people are actively supporting this war, we will see that it's 10% of Russians who are standing on those Imperialist positions and there are 20%, 25% of Russians standing on an active anti-war position.

The rest is just a swamp.

They're telling us whatever they think Mr. Putin wants to hear because they're simply afraid.

Christiane: So can you tell me what you hope to achieve and can you achieve with your new channel that's designed to counter the Kremlin's propaganda?

And let's face it, they have every massive tool at their disposal.

State media and everything else.

Everything else is shut down inside Russia.

>> Obviously, we are right now pretty small.

We have 100,000 subscribers and approximately 8 million of a monthly audience, which is nothing being compared with the scale that we need to achieve but, at the moment of the change, we hope to be the source of information because we are linked to the Russians who are fighting.

To the Russians who are fighting with Ukrainians at the field of war and we're connected to those resistance groups which are fighting inside Russia and we saw an example of a project which played a key role in protests against President Lukashenko just 30 years ago and we hope to take the same niche with our program.

Christiane: We talked about resistance but do you believe, according to the Pentagon papers that are leaked and you see what has been happening, yelling at the commander, do you believe there is infighting or differences between within the Kremlin, within the Russian chain of command, within Putin's circle about this war?

>> Obviously there are a lot of internal problems and there is a lot of internal fights and there is a fight of progression with everyone and there are fights with political circles in the Kremlin and fights between business circles but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of the Russian elite, I would assess 90% of Russia right now is position minded in terms of this war.

They want to stop this war.

They want to escape.

They want a personal way out and they're looking for this way out.

They're right now competing to be the first to find this way out so there is very little loyalty to Vladimir Putin and that's why it's our job together with the coalition, is to propose this way out and then the regime of Putin would finally collapse.

Christiane: And what is the way out?

How does it end?

>> They need to defect, they need to switch sides.

They need to start supporting Ukraine in this war and they need to start supporting Russian resistance.

It's pretty obvious but for this, we all need to say, yes, we want the regime change in Russia.

We don't want Putin to stay in power and we don't want him to select anyone to replace him.

We want the fundamental change.

Christiane: Ilya Ponomarev, a former member of the state duma, thanks for joining us from Poland.

In the meantime, dramatic scenes?

Pakistan following the... of the former prime minister Imran Khan.

Paramilitary police smashed windows to get to Khan, who is facing so-called graft charges.

One had been shot dead in the mayhem.

Our correspondent has this report.

Reporter: An eruption in Pakistan's long simmering political feud.

Paramilitary forces breaking through the window in the high court of the country's capital to detain perform former prime minister and cricket start Imran Khan, seen here in sunglasses.

They hauled him away on charges of corruption dating back to his time in government but the politician clearly... something like this.

He taped this statement before appearing in court.

>> By the time you receive these words of mine, I will have been detained on incorrect charges.

Pakistan's constitution has been buried.

I won't get the opportunity to speak to you again.

Reporter: Khan went on to tell supporters, the time has come for all of you to struggle for your rights.

In a matter of hours, protests erupt in cities across the country, some turning violent.

A CNN journalist saw a demonstrator shot and killed by police.

Pakistan's powerful military, a target of this anger.

Khan's political party shared this footage of protesters breaking through an apparently unguarded gate at the headquarters of the military.

And CNN films demonstrators overrunning the residence of the top military commander in Lahore.

Khan has been leading a public campaign against the current government and its military allies ever since a no-confidence vote in parliament last year forced him out of the prime minister's office.

In March, he resisted an attempt by police to arrest him for missing a court appearance, leading to clashes between police and his supporters around his home in Lahore.

They claim the court is trying to stop him from running later this year.

Pakistan's already struggling with soaring inflation that's seen skyrocketing prices for food and fuel.

A nuclear armed nation now reeling from economic and political crisis.

Christiane: Turning now to an urgent problem facing the whole world, hardly a day passes without dire warnings of climate change.

From a melting glacier to a severe heat wave that's sweeping Asia with several recording their highest ever temps over this past weekend.

Now the senior women for climate protection of Switzerland are saying enough is enough.

That's the name given to the so-called climate grannies who have taken their climate groundbreaking case all the way to the European Courts of Human Rights.

They say climate is affecting their health and human rights are at risk.

Jessica Seymour, here in the studio with me, is one of the lawyers representing this group of more than 2,000 Swiss women like Elizabeth Stern, joining me from Europe.

You are in your 70s.

I only say that because you have to be a certain age to be in this group.

What pushed you to take this all the way to the high court in Europe?

Elizabeth: Hello, good evening.

Yes, what was enough was that our three national courts actually dismissed us on very, I will say, hollow reasons.

You can only end up in Strasbourg when you have actually gone through the national courts.

In our case, there are three different ones and they all dismissed us on similar and also different reasons and because for us it's very clear that a healthy environment should be -- is, actually, a human right.

That's why we took our case to Strasbourg, hoping that we get a neutral verdict.

One that's free from party ideologies and that's what we are waiting for.

Christiane: Let me ask you, Jessica, what legally can the climate senior citizens achieve legally?

How can they prove that the Swiss government policies are directly impacting their quality of life and their human right?

Jessica: It was actually accepted by the Swiss government that elderly women are particularly and severely affected by heat.

And we can see from the five greatest heat waves that happened in the last eight years that there was both very high mortality and very high morbidity and that affected older people much more than younger people.

90% of people who died were over 75 and these were premature deaths, so there was an acceptance that those older people were affected and women are particularly affected, for some reason.

Christiane: Do you feel that you have a good case?

Is there a precedent or are you seeking to create a precedent?

Elizabeth: There is precedent.

It's very interesting because the Dutch Supreme Court, following the Strasbourg jury held that -- jurisprudence were both affected by the Dutch government to take sufficient measures to reduce their emissions.

So now Strasbourg, faced with the first case on human rights and climate change has to ask itself effectively whether the Dutch Supreme Court correctly understood its case law on environment and politics.

Christiane: It is extraordinary and very energizing for all those who want to see some kind of change and are frustrated with the failure to reach the U.N. goals, the Paris climate goals and all the rest.

The Swiss government says this is all manifestly ill founded and says it's committed to bringing down emissions by half by 2030.

What health issues if you yourself experienced?

What's your personal story in this?

Elizabeth: Yeah, what is my personal story?

I am now just at the beginning of that age group that is actually going to have health problems and mine started last summer.

I do not take the heat well.

I really have great problems.

And I'm now 75 1/2 and whatever is said in general about how women suffer, some of it is definitely true.

So far I haven't had a real heatstroke but heat cramps, then dehydration problems, because you drink but I don't know where it goes.

Evidently, women sweat less, or I should say it the other way around.

Men sweat more than they can put away the heat better from their body better than women can and last summer when we had five days in a row of temperatures well above 30 and I was traveling.

I was on a train, and it was terribly hot and I had a real breakdown.

And I thought oh, my god, is this the beginning of what?

It really felt like this is the end of it.

So afterwards, when it goes to 34, 35 degrees, which we are not used to here.

I have to stay home.

I have to close the shutters, I still have shutters on my house, and make sure that the sun stays out and I'm inside.

Make sure I don't turn on a light because that also makes the room warm and you are limited.

You think twice about when do you go shopping.

Christiane: You're painting a very, very vivid picture.

I wonder if you take any -- you're obviously on a pretty unprecedented route into this court and legal system but we also read that youngsters -- I mean, you're on the older side.

You're the seniors, but also, there are the youngsters, in the United States, for instance, in the state of Montana, 16 year olds are making a case pretty much like yours.

It's about their human rights and their right to a decent and livable life.

Do you see a kind of a coalition growing around this?

Elizabeth: Well, I guess that -- well, a coalition depends in which sense.

I mean, of course, we are learning about each other.

We hear about the different cases.

We see the commonalities like the case and also our case and the three others that are hanging in Strasbourg, they all base their complaint on the constitution of their country.

Whatever it says in the constitution, in our case, the right to life and health, and as I saw in the Montana case, the right for a healthy environment.

So that's sort of like the constitution taken as a base for complaining or for filing a suit against the government.

Christiane: Let me ask Jessica -- sorry, go ahead.

I'm going to get back to you in a second.

So do you see a sort of a legal coalition that could be patched together, the Swiss case or the Strasbourg case we're talking about, the Montana case.

We know that in -- I think it's Vanuatu, they won an historic vote at the U.N. calling on the I.C.J.

to provide the opinion and you mentioned other such things.

Jessica: That's certainly a legal momentum and it's all based around the fundamental question of climate change, which is there is a finite remaining budget of carbon emissions that can go into the atmosphere before we crush the temperature threshold and that has to be shared out between countries and if Switzerland took its entitlement solely on a per capita basis than on its current trajectory it would use up all its emissions entitlement by 2033.

But if you do it more fairly, based on historic commissions or wealth or various other elements of equity, Switzerland is already using other countries' carbon so this is their remaining finite budget that has to be shared-out and that central question in all the cases.

Christiane: It's really fascinated.

Elizabeth, how much you been treated in your own country?

What have, I don't know, government officials or people on the streets who have got to know of your case?

Elizabeth: Well, it has changed.

The narrative has actually changed to the positive.

Like at the beginning, 2016 when the group was founded, it was more in the foreground, all these funny old women and why are they not quiet?

And within 10 years they're under the ground anyway and why are they complaining?

It's the Boomers' generation.

They created the problem in the first place, so just don't complain, and this has changed.

This has changed, when people figured out that first of all, many of these women were active with all their levers.

They were not just suddenly coming out of nowhere complaining because oh, it's too hot.

They were active all along and we were invited to so many presentations, talks, and they learned that we are not the grannies, as -- [Laughter] Well, many of us are grannies but not in sort of the traditional sense of sitting in a rocking chair and just knitting something.

These are women -- they might be frail.

Some of us are frail in our body but god, I tell you, so fit in their head and in their commitment, which is really -- has become known, so that people have changed their attitude vis-a-vis us, very definitely.

It's now 2023, this is just six, seven years and it has changed.

More respect.

Christiane: That's great to hear.

We're looking at some pictures which looks like you and your sort of group heading to Strasbourg.

That was March 29.

Which will happen, Elizabeth, if you're not successful?

Elizabeth: Well, I tell you, if we are not successful, I mean, it would just be terrible because that would mean it sanctions actually the not doing enough in terms of protecting the people, the citizens, us from climate change.

I mean, that would be, for me, the worst.

Because it would say that having a healthy environment, no, no, no, it's not a human right and yeah, it would cement that certainly for the moment.

So that would -- I would feel real bad about that because it's also true that, yes, legally we do complain.

First of all because of us, because we are affected and you can only take your government to court when you're personally affected.

Yes, that's true but then we also have to -- the desire to build on a platform that has some benefit for the next generation.

So it's not just -- we're not just identifying with me right now but also with the next generation.

So if we would lose, it would really mean a tremendous loss for me in terms of cementing the status quo.

Christiane: So let me give the last word to you in terms of -- if you lose.

Do you think you will lose and if you do, is there another recourse?

Do you keep fighting this and taking it further up?

Jessica: First, I would just say that these are incredibly inspirational women.

They were the activists.

They were the generation of bra burning.

They got the vote in Switzerland because it came very late in Switzerland.

Christiane: And anti-nuclear as well.

Jessica: Anti-nuclear.

A powerful, inspiring, I think, group of women.

I was heartened by the fact that the court sent the case to the grand chamber.

That's their biggest chamber.

They had 17... And there were nine questions, which is very rare and all of those questions though showed that those judges had actually read the papers and understood the case.

All of that is heartening, so fingers crossed.

Christiane: Fingers crossed.

Jessica Simor and Elizabeth Stern, many people will be in your camp, and it's an amazing story.

Thank you so much.

In case you missed it, we want to show you again a report from Spain which also has seen record high temperatures, and with a lack of rainfall, rivers are running dry.

Think disappearing lakes, dead crops, and trucked-in water.

Here's correspondent Fred Pleitgen.

Reporter: From afar, even a natural disaster can look majestic but up close, the full impact of the global climate emergency is clear to see.

This is the Sau Reservoir near Barcelona.

Normally one of the largest bodies of fresh water in this part of Spain but months of drought and water levels are so low, an entire Medieval village, usually underwater, has come to light.

Normally this would be almost fully submerged, but now the church is very much on land and the authorities here fear things will get much worse in the summer heat.

The reservoir is already at less than 10% capacity, causing hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland to dry up.

All of this wheat is probably lost.

This farmer shows me why.

The grain should be milky, he said.

We're in a critical moment.

If it doesn't rain, this will end up empty.

We should be seeing the grain come up to here, but it's only like this.

If it doesn't rain in the coming week, the crop will be zero.

But there is no rain in sight and temperatures in Spain have skyrocketed.

Scientists at the Institute of Agri-food Research and Technology are trying to find ways to make very little water go a longer way.

Chief scientist Joan Girona says efficiency needs to be maximized.

>> It's our goal.

Making the most of a drop of water.

>> Just like the crops, the people of this area are also in survival mode.

Dozens of towns are without water and need to get it trucked in.

This village hasn't had any for about a year and residents say they can't even remember the last time it rained.

I don't recall, he says.

It's been a year or more without proper rain.

Nothing.

This region of Spain is a bread basket for all of Europe and while the authorities say they're building desalination plants, the head of the region's water authority says life here might change dramatically soon.

>> Sometimes I think about the capacity of the territory.

I mean, is this a country where we can handle with the increase of citizens, tourists, industry, farmers, agriculture or we should stop?

Reporter: And that point might be closer than some believe.

Back at the Sau Reservoir, authorities are actually draining most of the remaining water to prevent this precious an ever-scarcer resource from getting contaminated by the sludge at the bottom of this once mighty lake.

Christiane: Our next guest believes the threat of A.I.

might be even more urgent than climate change, if you can imagine that.

Geoffrey Hinton is considered the godfather of A.I.

and made headlines with his recent departure from Google.

To dive deeper into the dangers of A.I.

and how to manage them, he's joining Hari Sreenivasan now.

Reporter: Thank you so much, Christiane.

You are one of the more celebrated names in artificial intelligence.

You have been working at this for more than 40 years and I wonder, as you thought about how computers learn, did it go the way you thought it would when you started in this field?

>> It did until recently.

I thought if we built computer models of the brain learns, we would understand more how the brain learns.

All that was going on very well and then very suddenly, I realized recently that maybe the digital intelligences we were building on computers were actually learning better than the brain, and that changed my mind after about 50 years of thinking we would make better digital intelligences by making them more like the brain.

Reporter: This is something you and your colleagues must have been thinking about over these years.

Was there a tipping point?

>> There were several ingredients to it.

A year or two ago, I used a Google system called palm--that was a big chat box, and it couldn't explain why jokes were funny.

I've been using that as a litmus test of whether or not these things could understand what was going on.

I was shocked when they knew why they were funny.

Things like ChatGPT -- know thousands of times more than any human in basic common sense knowledge, but they have about a trillion connection strengths in their artificial neuron nets, and we have about 100 trillion connection strengths in the brain so with 100th as much storage capacity, they knew thousands of times more than us and that strongly suggests that it's got a better way of getting information into the connections.

And the third thing was, a couple of months ago, I suddenly became convinced that the brain wasn't using as good a learning algorithm as these digital intelligence.

Because brains can't exchange information really fast and these digital intelligences can.

I can have one model running on 10,000 different bits of hardware.

It's got the same connection strengths to every copy.

Every agent running on the different hardware can all learn from different bits of data but they can communicate to each other what they learned just by copying the weights because they all work identically, and brains aren't like that.

So they can communicate at trillions of bits a second.

And we can communicate at hundreds of bits a second.

It's such a huge difference.

Reporter: Some who may not have been following what's been happening with A.I.

and ChatGPT and Google's product Bard, explain what those are.

Some have explained it as the autocomplete feature, finishing your thought for you.

But what are these artificial intelligences doing?

>> It's difficult to explain, but I'll do my best.

It's true in a sense they're autocomplete, but if you think about it, if you want to do really good autocomplete, you need to understand what someone is saying and they've learned what you're saying just by doing autocomplete, but they do now seem to really understand.

The way they understand isn't at all like people in A.I.

50 years ago thought it would be.

In old-fashioned A.I., people thought you'd have internal symbolic expressions, a bit like whole sentences in your head and then be able to infer new sentences from old sentences, and it's nothing like that.

It's completely different.

And let me give you a sense of how much different it is.

I can give you a problem that doesn't make any sense in logic.

You know the answer intuitively, and these big models are really models of human intuition.

So suppose I tell you that there are male and female cats and male dogs and female dogs.

Suppose I tell you you have to make a choice.

Either you're going to have all cats male and all dogs female or all cats female and all dogs male.

You know it's biological nonsense, but you also know it's much more natural to make all cats female and all dogs male.

That's not a question of logic.

You have a big pattern of neural activity that represents cat and one that represents man and woman.

And the pattern for cat is more like the pattern for woman than it is the pattern for man.

That's the results of a lot of learning about men and women and cats and dogs.

But it's now intuitively obvious to you that cats are more like women and dogs are more like men because of these big patterns of neural activity you've learned.

You didn't have to do reasoning, it's just obvious.

That's how these things are working.

They're learning these big patterns of activity to represent things.

That makes all sorts of things just obvious to them.

Reporter: Ideas like intuition and basically context, those are the things that scientists and researchers always said, This is why we're fairly positive that we're not going to head to that "Terminator" scenario where the artificial intelligence gets smarter than human beings but what you're describing is -- these are almost consciousness, sort of emotional-level decision processes.

>> OK, I think if you bring sentience into it...it just clouds the issue so lots of people are confident these things aren't sentient yet.

And if you ask them what they mean by sentient, they don't know.

I don't understand how they're so confident they're not sentient if they don't know what the mean by "sentient."

Suppose I'm talking to a chat bot, and I suddenly realize it's telling me all sorts of things I don't want to know, like it's rushing out responses about somebody called Beyonce, who I'm not interested in because I'm an old white male.

I realize it suddenly thinks I'm a female girl.

If I were to ask it am I a teenage girl, it would say yes.

If I looked at the history of our conversation, I'd probably be able to say why it thinks I'm a teenage girl.

I'm using the word think in just the same sense we normally use it in.

It really just thinks that.

Reporter: Give me an idea of why this is such a significant leap forward.

It seems like there are parallel concerns for in the 1980s and 1990s, blue-collar workers were concerned about robots coming in and replacing them and not being able to control them.

And now this is kind after a threat to the white-collar class, people saying there are these bots and agents that can do a lot of things we used to think were things only people can?

>> I think there are a lot of things we need to worry about with these new kinds of digital intelligences.

I'm talking about the existential threat that where they'll become more intelligent than us and get control.

Many other threats, which are also severe.

They include these things, taking away jobs.

In a decent society, that would be great.

It would mean everything got more productive and everyone was better off but the danger is it will make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

That's not A.I.

's fault.

That's how we organize society.

There's dangers about them making it impossible to know what's true by so many fakes out there.

That's something you might address by treating it like counterfeiting.

Governments don't like you printing their money.

It's a serious offense.

It's also a serious offense to deposit to somebody else if you knew it was fake.

I think governments are going to have to create similar regulations for fake videos and fake voices and fake images.

It's going to be hard.

As far as I can see the only way to stop ourselves being swamped by fake images, etc., is to have strong regulation and serious laws.

You have serious consequences if you produce a video by A.I.

and it doesn't say it's made with A.I.

That's what they do with counterfeit money.

I talked to Bernie Sanders last week about it, and he liked that view of it.

Reporter: Can governments and central banks and private banks all agree on certain standards because there's money at stake?

And I wonder, is there enough incentive for governments to sit down together and try to craft some sort of rules of what's acceptable and what's not?

Some sort of Geneva convention or accords?

>> It would be great if governments could say, Look, these fake videos are so good at manipulating the electorate that we need them all marked as fake.

Otherwise we're going to lose democracy.

The problem is that some politicians would like to lose democracy, so that's going to make it hard.

Reporter: So how do you solve for that?

It seems like this genie is out of the bottle.

>> What we're talking about right now is the genie of being swamped with fake news.

Organizations like Cambridge Analytica had an effect by pumping out fake news on Brexit, and it's clear that Facebook was manipulated to have an effect on the 2016 election so the genie is out of the bottle in that sense.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

The main thing I'm talking about is the risk of these things becoming super intelligent and taking over control from us.

I think the existential threat, we're all in the same boat, the Chinese, the Americans, the Europeans.

They all would not like super intelligence to take over from people.

So I think for that existential threat we will get collaboration between all the companies and countries because none of them want the super intelligence to take over.

In that sense that's like global nuclear war, where even during the Cold War, people could collaborate on its prevention because it was not in anybody's interest.

That's one, in a sense, positive thing about this existential threat.

It should be possible to get people to prevent it.

Reporter: One of your more recent employers was Google and you were a V.P.

and a fellow there, and you recently decided to leave the company to be able to speak more freely about A.I.

They just launched their own version, Bard, back in March.

Here we are now.

What do you feel like you can say today, or will say today, that you couldn't a few months ago?

>> Not much, really.

I just wanted to be -- if you work for a company and you're talking to the media, you tend to think, What implications does this have for the company?

At least you ought to think that because they're paying you.

I don't think it's honest to take the money from the company and then completely ignore the company's interests.

But if I don't take the money, I can just say what I think.

It happens to be the case that -- everybody wants to spin the story that I left Google because they were doing bad things.

That's more or less the opposite of the truth.

I think Google is very responsible, and I think having left Google, I can say good things about it and be more credible.

I'm just less constrained.

Reporter: Do you think that tech companies, given that it's mostly their engineering staff trying to work on developing these intelligences, are going to have better opportunities to create the rules of the road than, say, governments or third parties?

>> I do, actually.

There are some places governments have to be involved, like regulations that force you to show whether something was A.I.-generated, but in terms of keeping control of a superintelligence, what you need is the people who are developing it to be doing lots of little experiments with it and seeing what happens as they're developing it and before it's out of control and that's going to be mainly the researchers in companies.

I don't think you can leave it to philosophers to speculate on what might happen.

Everyone who's ever written a computer program and has gotten empirical feedback knows that you quickly disabuses you of your idea that you understood what was going on.

So I agree with people like Sam Altman at Open A.I.

that this stuff is inevitably going to be developed because there are so many good uses of it.

What we need is, as it's being developed, we put a lot of resources into it to try to keep control of it.

Reporter: Back in March there were more than a thousand different folks in the tech industry, people like Steve Wozniak asking to have a six-month pause on the development of artificial intelligence, and you didn't sign that.

How come?

>> I thought it was completely unrealistic.

The point is these are going to be extremely useful for things like medicine, for reading scans accurately and quickly.

They're going to be useful for designing materials to make more efficient solar cells, for example.

They're going to be tremendously useful, they already are for predicting floods and earthquakes.

Going to be tremendously useful in understanding climate change, so they're going to be developed.

There's no way that's going to be stopped.

I thought it was maybe a sensible way of getting media attention but not that sensible a thing to ask.

Not feasible.

What we should be asking for is that comparable resources are put into dealing with the bad possible side-effects dealing with keeping these things under control as we're developing them.

At present, 99% of the money is going into developing them and 1% going into people saying these things might be dangerous.

It should be more like 50-50, I believe.

Reporter: Are you optimistic we'll be able as humanity to rise to this challenge or are you less so?

>> I think we're entering a time of huge uncertainty.

I think one would be foolish to be either optimistic or pessimistic.

We just don't know what's going to happen.

The best we can do is say, Let's put a lot of effort into ensuring that whatever happens is as good as it could have been.

It's possible that there's no way we will control these superintelligence and that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.

That in a few hundred years, there will be no man.

Just all artificial intelligence.

We just don't know.

Predicting the future is a bit like looking into a fog.

You can see about 100 yards very clearly and then at 200 yards, you can't see anything.

It's like a wall, and I think that wall is about 100 years.

Reporter: Geoffrey, thank you for your time.

Christiane: For evidence of our humanity, just look at our deep and abiding love of dogs.

This week at the annual Westminster Canine Dog Show.

200 dogs vie for a prize.

This year's favorite for best in show is Winston, a cream-colored French bulldog who was last year's runner-up.

Whichever comes out as top dog, the Westminster Kennel Club stands as a tribute to the companionship our dogs bring us here at the end of the leash.

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