AI, Regulation and Humanity
Hello, I hope all is great! Forward is still buzzing about the news last week in PA.
I appeared on CNBC last week to talk about the need for an AI-dedicated federal agency. AI and its implementations are evolving so quickly that it needs to be the sole focus of knowledgeable regulators.
One of the most prominent AI experts making a similar case is Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at NYU and founder of an AI company. Gary called for an International Agency to govern AI in a widely seen TED talk last month. “These tools are so good at giving convincing narratives about just about anything. I’m deeply concerned about misinformation. Bad actors will use AI tools to threaten democracy.”
Gary took his message to the US Senate where he recently testified. He said to me, “A ton of Senators from both parties showed up; there’s a clear desire to understand what the impact of AI is likely to be. That was encouraging.”
Gary sat down with me in a podcast interview this week. Among his proposed policies - licenses for AI models. “I think licenses for AI models are a good idea. They’re going to be used by millions of people, so it stands to reason that someone should make sure they’re not doing something destructive before they’re rolled out.”
Gary’s big calls at TED were to synthesize both symbolic systems and neural networks in next-generation AI and to establish an international regulatory body. Gary is skeptical that sentient reasoning AI – often described as Artificial General Intelligence (“AGI”) - is around the corner. “I’d be very surprised if AGI is achieved in, say, the next decade. But we have enough to be worried about with the current generative models and their uses right now.”
I agree with Gary on just about every front. There is a massive need for international collaboration on AI as well as a more coherent federal approach that includes a dedicated agency. “91% of people think that we should carefully manage AI,” Gary notes. I hope that our government rises to the challenge.
I sometimes joke that Washington D.C. is on a twenty-year tape delay, in part because of the advanced ages of many of our leaders. Legislators have been asleep at the switch when it came to social media for the past 20 years. We’ve all paid for it. Policy and politics are now often at cross-purposes; delivering good policy is more likely to exact a cost for individual actors than to reward them. That’s what we have to change.
I hope that we break from our recent pattern where AI is concerned. It’s no exaggeration to say that our future is at stake. Let’s make solutions politically rewarding and back those who want to do the right thing.
For my interview with Gary click here.
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