Surely our creaking gerontocracy is well-equipped to respond to a technology as novel, disruptive, and rapidly evolving as AI, right?
Well, we hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but a new piece from Politico makes it sure sound like that Congress is completely stumped by how to tackle AI, with over a dozen lawmakers and congressional aides venting to the newspaper about the lack of urgency on the Hill over regulating the tech. Many questioned whether elected representatives fully grasp, or are even capable of grasping, the technology they’re dealing with.
“There is a percentage of my colleagues who are still trying to spell AI,” representative Sam Liccardo (D-CA) told Politico. “We need to dramatically increase the base knowledge of Congress if we’re going to legislate meaningfully,” he added. “And I know that is not going to happen overnight.”
Liccardo likely isn’t exaggerating. Last year, a minor brouhaha erupted over Trump’s secretary of education Linda McMahon repeatedly pronouncing AI as “A1” — yes, like the steak sauce — while bloviating about how important chatbots were in the classroom.
There seems to be a growing consensus on the Hill that there needs to be more substantive AI regulation. These concerns were catalyzed this week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit his job at the company, and in a post that went mega viral, warned that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” by building powerful AI models that they knew could destroy humanity.
But no one, it seems, can agree on what that regulation should look like, while many are content to pass the buck on the issue.
Politico points out how senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who serves as senate commerce chair, endorsed passing legislation to prevent “catastrophic risk” after the Anthropic researcher’s warnings, and pointed to a bipartisan AI bill touted by senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) and senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MI) that’s supposed to lay out more concrete regulations. But neither senator has said when they plan to actually introduce the bill, and requests for comments to their offices have gone unanswered or were met with a vague statement.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other progressives, meanwhile, are advocating for a ban on developing an AI superintelligence — a technology that, while posing clear existential risks, we don’t know is even possible to build yet.
So is someone in power going to actually do something about regulating AI? It’s probably not a good sign when the actual lawmakers running this country are asking themselves the same question, too.
“You cannot just put your head in the sand on AI and say, ‘I hope it works out.’ You can’t just go in and say, ‘Government’s got the solution — they’re just going to ban it all.’ That’s just not going to work,’” representative Chip Roy (R-TX), a conservative who’s on his way out of office, told Politico. “We’re going to have to be thoughtful as leaders and actually have some friggin’ leadership.”
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