President Trump met recently with leaders in technology companies that are building artificial intelligence. He told them that he wants the expansion of AI to be unregulated because he believes in unfettered competition and besides, we are in a race with China.
Bill Gates disagrees. He worries that AI could cause massive destruction, killing hundreds of millions of people.
Ezra Klein of the New York Times recently interviewed Gates and asked him why he believes that artificial intelligence should be regulated. Gates explains that AI could be directed to create bioweapons or it could be used to hack into our banking system and destroy our economy or the economy of any society dependent on networking.
He does talk a bit about education towards the end of the interview. He recognizes the difficulty of scaling up innovations from a small group of highly motivated teachers to a much larger population of teachers.
But the big takeaway from the interview is that AI has the potential to do massive good for society or to inflict disruption and mass death. He makes the case for government regulations. We regulate automobiles, drugs, tobacco, alcohol, and a wide range of activities that are dangerous to humanity; why not regulate a technology that could destroy humanity?
MathBabe’s Blog reported this morning:
Oh look, banks are being hacked by AI | mathbabe
“Mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil, writing on her mathbabe blog, argues that artificial intelligence poses immediate operational, economic, and systemic threats rather than threatening physical human existence. She contends that automated systems and AI agents are poised to enable large-scale financial hacking, eliminate entry-level livelihoods, and perpetuate structural biases without acting as sentient doomsday entities.”
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Notwithstanding my general dislike of Bill Gates due to his tampering with education, I cannot help being in agreement on this matter. Like computers in general, AI gives individuals massive power if they or even he controls it. This Montesquieu bypass is problematic. Montesquieu recognized that balancing one powerful group against the other was the only path to freedom. Bypassing this principle is a huge problem. AI gives extraordinary powers to the people who control it.
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Gates finally got something right. AI must be regulated to ensure global safety, and tech companies must be held accountable. Trump’s idea that the tech companies would “work it out themselves” is absurd. Companies need to clean up the mess they make, and too many companies have been given a pass in this regard. We cannot allow renegade AI to put humanity in danger. All AI should have some type of kill switch in order to stop the progression of destruction, IMO.
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