Robot warfare + is misogyny making a comeback?

0:00This is a Triple J podcast. Ha! Every billionaire has a douchebag. Parliament is a sick place. I thought, oh my God, I might be an alcoholic. Obviously, I'm an adequate guest, isn't it? No, that's not what I'm saying. Who's the Prime Minister? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Ha! Is misogyny getting worse? Because some recent research on Gen Zed's views on women has disturbed a lot of people. From thinking women should always obey their husbands or that they should never initiate sex. What is going on here? Why are some young people saying feminism's gone too far? Others saying hatred for women is getting worse. G'day, it's Dave Markhazy with you for hack. Later, we're diving into this research and asking what you think. Do you think feminism has gone too far? I don't think so. I think sometimes women want the best of both worlds. Interesting stuff in there. I'm keen to hear your thoughts as well. If you've seen the research, if you've got stories from your own life, get in touch, oh, four, three, nine, seven, five, seven, triple, five, that is coming up later.

1:02First though. Hack. Why are millions of people uninstalling Chatubiti? Because OpenAI made a deal with the Department of War on Triple J. What role should AI have in war? Because we know it's being used for everything in society. What about firing weapons without any human oversight? Because these are some of the questions at the center of a contract dispute between one of the biggest AI companies in the world and the US government. Anthropic, creators of Claude, recently sacked by the US Defense Department over the issue of autonomous weapons. So is there a place for artificial intelligence in war? And what is the line? Jackson Worthington's been looking into it. AI companies are facing a shake up at the top research ranks with high profile departures at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Over the past few weeks, a crazy amount of very senior researchers

2:02in artificial intelligence have been resigning. On the way out, they say the world of AI is going in a dangerous direction. The latest OpenAI's head of robotics. Caitlin Kalowski announced she was stepping down after the company agreed to deploy its AI models on the Pentagon's classified networks. So what's going on? So this way I've really kicked off a few weeks back when the US Department of War got into a dispute with Anthropic. Anthropic is an AI lab that developed an advanced chatbot and virtual assistant called Claude, something the American military wanted to integrate into their systems. Anthropic told the department it wanted two guarantees to do a deal. We have said to the Department of War, that we are okay with all use cases except for two. One is domestic master violence. Case number two is fully autonomous weapons. This is the idea of making weapons that fire without any human involvement. But the department wouldn't agree. Breaking news, Anthropic blacklisted. President Trump moments ago,

3:03pulling the plug on the government's use of Anthropic AI technology. Then the US government went further, moving to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk, effectively banning other companies with defense work from working with Anthropic at all. Donald Trump posted that the US would never allow a radical left woke company to dictate how the military fights and wins wars. We are patriotic Americans. Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting US national security. Dario Amade is the CEO of Anthropic. In the hours after Donald Trump's truth, social posts, he spoke to American news outlets, CBS. I have always believed that, you know, as we defend ourselves against our autocratic adversaries, we have to do so in ways that defend our democratic values and preserve our democratic values. On Tuesday, our time, Anthropic announced it was suing the US government, but the Department of Defense have already signed up a new partner. Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT.

4:03Here's why everyone's canceling ChatGPT. So what were the terms of the new deal? Well, CEO Sam Altman initially said the company had gotten agreement preventing defense from using its AI systems for mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons, but later he walked that back. In fact, US media is reporting he told staff the company doesn't get to choose how the military uses its tech. So what happens now? Well, people online are calling for a ChatGPT boycott and some of Open AI is seeing your stuff quit. They're sounding the alarm that the world's on a dangerous path. There's also been protests outside Open AI's office in San Francisco. If we let this technology be integrated with our military, we are looking at a state of war completely unprecedented. We are looking at a surveillance state that none of us agreed to. We have time to fight and we have time to fight now. Hack on Triple J. Jackson Worthington reporting there. We're hearing from you on the text line. Someone says, AI can barely get an email right when I'm trying not to sound like a jerk

5:04in the workplace that alone trusted to fire weapons. That person says, another person says, this is exactly why we need to be nice to the robots. The uprising has begun. Look, it is a serious issue and people have big concerns about AI's use in warfare. One of those is Neil Rannick, his lecturer at UNSW and looks at the ethics of killing, the changing character of war, emerging military technologies. He's with us now. Neil, thank you very much for joining us on Hack. Yeah, no worries. What are the issues you take? Like, ethically, what are the main things that really make you question the use of AI in warfare? My first concern is that we're currently in a kind of AI hype bubble and that extends to military AI and we've convinced ourselves that these technologies can have an accuracy on the battlefield that that doesn't currently conform to the empirical reality. So I think my immediate concern is that it's going to lead

6:06to people who shouldn't be killed, being killed, who otherwise wouldn't be killed if we weren't using these technologies. But there's also a kind of broader and deeper concern. Military AI and autonomous weapons are of a part of a broader vision of warfare which prioritizes speed, acceleration, compressed decision windows. The current obsession is we have to act faster than the enemy and overwhelm them with the sheer pace of our lethality in our operations. And as someone who teaches ethics, something you often find in ethical scenarios and ethical dilemmas is, you need a bit of time to think, to stop and consult your gut and to talk to other people and to work out your discomforts and sort of really weigh the ethical and political wisdom. I wonder if we're going to increasingly get points in future warfare where there just literally isn't the space to exercise ethics in a meaningful way.

7:07Well, some might say to that, Neil, is there a choice? Like, if the enemy is utilizing these tools, it's all well and good to say, oh, we've got all these safeguards in place and we're not using them. We're relying on human thought and human action, but is that feasible in warfare? Yeah, I mean, I hear this a lot, someone who teaches the defense academy. You know, I don't think we should discard this out of hand. Like, it is true that China and Russia and other countries that we currently consider are adversaries at developing this technology. So there obviously is an enormous pressure to develop and innovate. But I think two things are very important here. One, is the technology going to do what we think it's going to do? And if the answer is no, then we shouldn't allow ourselves to be lured into this sort of great power contestation mentality. So do you reckon? I also think there's a secondary point. You know, we talk about ourselves endlessly as the good guys.

8:08And you know, there are some situations in warfare where in order to exercise your ethical and legal responsibility, including not killing civilians, you may have to cop a slight operational disadvantage on occasions. That's always been the case. You know, we can always sacrifice ethics to exigency, but if we want to continue to call ourselves sort of virtuous in war, there may be some decisions we shouldn't take despite their military benefit. So do you think, Neil, that a company like Anthropic deserves a bit of credit should be congratulating for standing up and saying, actually, we've got a couple of issues here? Yes, I do. I think they deserve some credit. But not heaps of credit, huh? Yeah, and certainly not endless credit. Like, I do think it took courage and they've worn, you know, a fairly enormous cost so far to them having some ethical courage in this situation. You know, the designation of a supply chain risk if it goes ahead, which I still think is an open question.

9:08But that could, you know, lead to an enormous financial loss. The one thing I will say, though, is, I mean, the ethical bar is very low right now, in my opinion. You know, there were only two red lines there. No mass surveillance of American citizens, leaving the rest of our support suckers, presumably vulnerable to mass surveillance at the discretion of the Pentagon. And the other red line was no use of Claude, specifically for fully autonomous weapons. But there's like a whole host of different ways you can integrate AI into military processes that are similarly fraught with serious ethical and legal concerns. And none of that is touched by these red lines. So I would maybe suggest to listeners, this is an incredibly important debate. The question of whether or not we use AI specifically to kill other human beings is enormously important. But there is a far broader debate going on within the military and outside of the military as to what should the ethical responsibilities

10:09of these companies look like. And I would perhaps hazard to say that it shouldn't be the company themselves that are working out these regulatory systems. Yeah, we've got a lot of thoughts on this one coming through. Someone says this is terrifying. Who knew the Terminator was a documentary and actually a couple of people saying, if you don't see the Terminator mission impossible, dead reckoning, outcome is always the same. AI kills everything. We've got Erica in Gipsle and saying, AI is already destroying our brains and our planet. I can't believe people are only boycotting it now. And someone else saying, I always thought the development of AI was principally for the use in war, like all other major technological developments over the past century. This is how I'm Dave Marcazi. I'm talking AI use in war with Neil Ranick, who's a lecturer in ethics at the University of New South Wales, whether we should be slowing things down here. What the risks are of using artificial intelligence in warfare. Now, one of the things that you talk about is something called responsibility by design.

11:13Can you explain what that is? So first of all, this wouldn't be a silver bullet at all. I think there needs to be a kind of host of different approaches. But one of the things we look at with responsibility by design is a lot of engineers who work in this space just don't know what their responsibilities should look like. When it comes to designing these military technologies, they don't know what the laws of war are. They don't know what the effects of some of their technical choices might be further down the line when it gets to the battlefield. They don't know what the just war tradition is. I think a more kind of meaningful, comprehensive approach to legal, technical, and ethical responsibilities and the earliest stages of the design process of military technologies would certainly be to the good. It wouldn't solve everything. But it's a good first step, I think, in having AI companies who are extraordinarily powerful, having a bit more responsibility. Ideally, one is responsible governments regulating these companies in ways they need to be regulated

12:15and having far more exacting guard rails that prioritize civilian protection more than they currently do. How likely do you think it is that Australia could go down a similar route to the United States because there is a lot of attention on defense budgets, especially now, governments either criticized for spending too much or not enough on defense, can only expect that to increase the pressure as the geopolitical situation deteriorates around the world. Do you feel like we could be signing up to agreements similar to this? There is an enormous appetite within Australia for autonomous technologies, drone swarms, autonomous drone swarms, autonomous naval capacity, like a lot of it. I think some of the things that are so appealing about this technology are especially appealing to Australia. There's this perception that this will enable countries that utilize it to lower military costs, to have a kind of force multiplier,

13:15and to have a kind of technological edge that can offset some other traditional disadvantages like smaller populations and tighter military budgets. But again, I just think this is why it is so important to be clear-eyed about what this technology probably is going to do and what it isn't going to do. I sometimes hear conversations about AI, and they're talked about some magical Deus Ex that's going to cut the gaudy and not of all of the problems we encounter in warfare. It's going to eliminate the fog of war. It's going to allow us to kill who we want when we want and leave civilians unharmed. And I think some sobriety is needed here. I think it's, when states are desperate and when they've convinced themselves that they're dealing with some new revolutionary technology, it's very easy to act stupidly and over-invest in things that haven't yet proven their worth. And when those things can potentially generate some fairly serious legal and ethical challenges, then this is obviously highly problematic. So I do think Australia has an appetite.

14:17I do think Australians need to be concerned with some of the military investments that this country is looking to make in the AI. And I think everyone needs to hold the government to a high standard when it comes to their ethical and legal obligations in war. Well, look, as always, with any discussion around AI, I don't know how I feel at the end of it. What? I do appreciate you coming on and giving us a bit of a rundown of what it looks like overseas and here. Neil Renek, lecturer in ethics at the University of New South Wales, appreciate your time. Yeah, no worries, thanks a lot. And still so many messages coming through on this, someone saying Israel has already normalized using AI in war. Tom in Balorat saying, we're currently deploying personnel in support of a war that started when a girls school was bombed. Do we really still think we're the good guys, Tom says? Another person saying this conversation is crazy. Obviously, computers should not be able to kill people. And another person saying, if war crimes are committed at the hands of AI, who is responsible? Is it the country or the company?

15:18Heck, some people take it a little bit too far, like I feel sometimes the actual meaning of feminism has changed. On Triple J, has feminism gone too far? Or do you think misogyny is getting worse? There be questions, but they've been part of new Australian research, looking at whether misogyny is linked to extremism. Research is saying, manosphere content is having an impact and it is spilling into other parts of society, maybe even your favorite TV show. Have you noticed this? Like are you noticing more misogyny amongst your peers, friends, colleagues, messaging, 043-975-7-Triple-5? Alice Angeloni has been looking into it. Do you think feminism has gone too far? I don't think so. I think sometimes women want the best of both worlds. Feminism, misogyny, and the relationship between men and women. If you spend time online,

16:18you'll be seeing these things debated a lot. They want everything, but then they also want to do the male role as well. I feel like feminism gets a bad rap, just because it's very outspoken, but it's the direct opposite to what misogyny is. And with two big pieces of research out in the past week on young people's attitudes to these topics, we've been doing some surveying ourselves, asking young people in the Sydney CBD today. Some people probably use the movement negatively, but I think the concept on a whole is probably pretty spot on. And in regional Australia here in Cops Harbour. We wouldn't really think that I got enough information about it. I don't know how it's so much about it. We'll get into the research in a sec, but first the context. The social platforms were all spending a lot of time on every day and what we watch on TV. I'm not interested in having girl friends. I don't want someone that's going to be masculine energy to a relationship. I've been very conceited and superficial. You're just friends, oh, and you're distracted. Never ever crash out about a beat. Talking to people today, reality TV came up a bit, particularly this drama on Channel 9's Married At First Side.

17:21It's been maps of what's on there though. It's around groom Tyson who said he wants a submissive wife. She's definitely not the submissive top, that's for sure. There's been a couple times where I felt a little bit emasculated. Even during the wedding day, she asked me if I'd be a house husband. No, it wouldn't be a house husband. So what would you call it then? Like, if I didn't want someone so challenging and dominant in a relationship. Well, are you saying that you want to be with someone who doesn't challenge you? Essentially. He's terrible. It's not how anyone should speak or treat the opposite gender or anyone in general. So behind all the noise, what are young people taking away from all this? Dr. Sarah Meager is a researcher at Melbourne Uni. The rate with which Australians are expressing that feminism has gone too far, that we need to do some actively-resist feminism, I think, should have us concerned. Sarah Meager and her colleagues have been surveying 2,300 adults and 1,100 teenagers age between 13 and 17. Their full paper isn't published yet, but she says some of the findings are already a surprise.

18:2321% of teenage boys think that they have a right to control their girlfriends and who their girlfriends talk to online with their girlfriends post. The survey is nationally representative and had 300 questions on topics like misogyny, gender roles, violence against women and radical ideologies. Between men and women and between different generations, there were some big variations. Believing that women lie about domestic and sexual violence, 40% of teenage boys expressed agreement with this attitude. One trend is that teenagers and young men seem to have stronger negative views about women than older guys. There's one question that says sometimes women bother me just by being around. 30% of teenage boys agreed with that sentiment compared to 15% of adult men. Sarah Meager also says teenage girls weren't too far behind. I mean, sure, 26% of teenage boys

19:24are agreeing with our in-sell measures, but so are 18% of teenage girls. Globally, the polling company Ipsos also released some stats this week. Across 29 countries, including Australia, it found more than half of people believe gender equality has gone too far. While half of men said the push for equality between men and women had tipped into discrimination against men, there was also a big difference in thinking about the future. Only 40% of men thought they'd have a better life than their dads compared to 55% of women when asked about their mums. So can relationships between men and women improve from here? Well, on the streets today, a lot of people weren't too confident. If you're like some days, it gets better and then something happens and then you're like, okay, we're right back to where we started. You're listening to Hack on Triple J. Alice Angeloni reporting there and I'm keen to hear your thoughts on this. Do you think misogyny is getting worse? Message in, 0439757535

20:27hearing from people on the text line now. Someone says, for men who are used to inherent privilege, equality seems like they're losing something. They're terrified of having to compete on a level playing field. That person says, another person saying, I attended a former boys school that was co-ed in Year 11 and 12. When I started there, it was genuinely a culture shock. The boys were racist, misogynistic, bullied each other, the toxic masculinity was unbelievable. Also, asking, has feminism gone too far and getting messages through on that? Someone says feminism hasn't gone far enough. Another person, Paul says, feminists demands are overboard and men are frightened and had enough of their egos. All right, well, let's unpack some of these thoughts a little more now with Dr. Lisa Portland, who is an author and researcher who looks at this exact kind of thing. Lisa, thank you very much for joining us on Hack. Thank you for having me. I'm just going to put some figures to you first. More than 30% of Gen Z men saying,

21:28a wife should always obey the husband, more than two out of five Aussies feeling that things have gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights and 30% of men saying, they should never say, I love you to a friend. What do you think when you hear some of those figures in statistics? Look, I think that they should be more shocking to me, but they're not, because this kind of rise of the atmosphere and of boys in particular, so Gen Z having these sentiments is not particularly news. So we've kind of seen a rise in this since around 2021. There's been a whole heap of research of which the two research pieces that you played previously a part of, which indicate that there's this growing sense amongst young men that feminism has gone too far, that there are now unequal rights that sway in the women's favour. And obviously a lot of these kinds of negative sentiment

22:29directed towards women. We've got people on the text line now. Someone says, the way referring to women just as females used to be an in-sell indicator, where now it's such a common way people refer to women, I feel like we're headed backwards. That person says another person saying, I feel like all of this is because of Andrew Tate. I mean, there is this big want desire to find the cause of some of these trends Lisa. And obviously Andrew Tate, the Manusphere is one of those things that people point to. Is it as simple as that, what do you think? Yeah, look, I mean, my research kind of sits in that space of women, gender, digital intimacy, dating apps, social media, etc. So certainly there is the impact of the Andrew Tate's of the Manusphere of dating apps, which are quite a misogynistic kind of landscape. You know, a lot of these technologies are sort of built by programmers, so to speak, from Silicon Valley. So, you know, there are sort of sexist elements

23:32that are built into those technologies in terms of who's hot and who's not the disposability of relationships, etc. But I wouldn't necessarily say that it can all be blamed on social media and on dating apps and the internet. It's certainly kind of eaking into the mainstream, into, you know, television programs. So I would say that it is becoming far more general public. There was this recent controversy on married at first sight, on maths, where a contestant made headlines for saying he wants a submissive wife, dislikes, woke women. What have you made of those comments? I imagine you've seen them. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is really concerning. So I think this is a mainstreaming of these views around submission, obedience, etc. And, you know, while I do understand that reality television programs, like maths,

24:34dramatic size, that, you know, produces are there to get the ratings. They're not really there for social impact or anything along those lines. But I think putting someone like that on the program kind of sets the tone that this is a behaviour that is acceptable by the mainstream and by the general public. And while we watch these programs and know that they're reality television, and we know that there are storylines and all that sort of stuff behind them, it's very easy to kind of think that this is, these are behaviours that can be brought forward within the relationship domain. This is Harkham Dave Marcazi. I'm speaking with author, researcher, Dr. Lisa Portland about some of this recent research that's had people worried thinking that there could be this rise in misogyny amongst Gen Z among young people, not only in Australia, but around the world. We're hearing from you on the text line. Someone says, some men take what feminism fights against as a personal attack and get defensive.

25:35Another person saying, it's such a sad world when men want to put women in a box. There's going to be a lot of single men in the future, women are not going to stand for this. But then we've got a couple of other messages. We've got Carlos who says, everyone talks about misogyny, what about misandry, talking about that word referring to hatred of men. And George in Sydney says, equality isn't the problem, but it's the fact that women want more equality without actually treating men and women equally. That does seem to be a sentiment that we are getting on our text line now, Lisa. What do you say to that? Well, I think it's a little bit curious to be honest, because I think the concept of feminism there needs to be sort of like a level of education around it. It's not as if feminism is saying that the end of men or anything along those lines, it's really around equality. It's about equal rights from a financial perspective, from an emotional labor perspective, from a labor perspective within the home

26:36and also externally within the workplace. You know, we're hyperconscious that the wage gap is still there and all those different elements. So I think that there needs to be sort of a bit of a rebranding around the word feminism, because, you know, and it needs to be seen within a positive light in terms of bringing those scales into balance as opposed to swinging them in either direction. Do you think financial hardship could have something to do with this that people are really struggling in life at the moment and looking for something to point the finger at that they're saying, I'm not getting by and something's changed and maybe this is what's responsible. Yeah, I absolutely think so. I think that the cost of living is having a major impact on, you know, a lot of people across Australia and unfortunately there is sort of that sense of pointing fingers towards what exactly is going on and, you know, historically women and migrants have been easy targets in terms of pointing those fingers. Right, so there was a recent study,

27:37I think that indicated that 63% of people felt like the cost of living crisis had had a negative impact on their romantic relationship. Yeah, wow, that's really, really interesting stuff. We're hearing from so many people now, Lisa, someone saying some men take what feminism fights against as a personal attack, Dave saying, I'm looking into misogyny at the moment, due to comments from some of my mates on Kelly Holiday and the death threats he is getting, referring to the artist, the singer. I'm trying to understand why it's happening because I'm also copying some pushback for being a stay at home dad. That's interesting. Someone else, Chloe and Ballarat says, I desperately need men to stop expecting women to solve their mental health issues. It's not helping anyone, Chloe says. Another person says it's such a sad world that men want to put women in a box. There's going to be a lot of single men in the future and another person saying, I live in Melbourne, I'm a guy and I actually used to think feminism was wrong,

28:37but now I feel the opposite after studying it. I think women definitely have more self awareness than men do. I mean, it's also probably worth pointing out that there is other research that shows that out of the United States that maybe it's a bit more of a complex issue that some young men do want to see vulnerable depictions of dads in the media, maybe don't necessarily align with traditional gender roles. So it's, yeah, there's definitely a lot of gray area there and I wish we had more time to discuss at Lisa, but unfortunately, we're out of time. Dr. Lisa Portland, author and researcher, really appreciate you coming on. Thanks. Thank you so much. And we've still got more messages coming through someone kind of saying what Lisa was saying before feminism is about choice, that's it, just choice that women have the choice to stay at home or work, agency and independence. Look, that is all we've got time for on hack for now. Thanks.