Is the US Government Ready for the Rise of Artificial Intelligence? Frankenstein Moment: R. Reich

[appalachiablue]

- AI could benefit society, but it could also become a monster. To guide the way, we need leadership and understanding. - By Robert Reich, The Guardian, March 7, 2023.

We’re at a Frankenstein moment.

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with hi-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry. Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes. In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects.

Most lawmakers don’t even know what AI is, according to Representative Jay Obernolte, the only member of Congress with a master’s degree in artificial intelligence. What to do? Many tech executives claim they can simultaneously look out for their company’s interests and for society’s. Rubbish. Why should we assume that their profit motives align perfectly with the public’s needs? Sam Altman – the CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for some of the most mind-blowing recent advances in AI – believes no company, including his, should be trusted to solve these problems.

The boundaries of AI should be decided, he says, not by “Microsoft or OpenAI, but society, governments, something like that”.

But does anyone trust the government to do this? If not, how can “society” manage it? Where can we look for a model of how to protect ourselves from the downsides of an emerging technology with such extraordinary upsides, without stifling it? One place to look is Herbert Hoover. Seriously. Not when Hoover was president and notoriously failed to do anything about the Great Depression, but when he was US secretary of commerce between 1921 to 1929. One of Hoover’s great achievements a century ago, largely unrecognized and unremembered today, was managing the development of a new and crucial technology in the public interest.

That new technology was electricity. Thomas Edison and other entrepreneurs and the corporations they spawned were busily promoting all manner of electric gadgets. Those gadgets had the potential to make life easier for millions of people. But they could also pose grave dangers. They could destroy buildings, and injure or kill people. Hoover set out to ensure that the infrastructure for electricity – wires, plugs, connectors, fuses, voltage and all else – was safe and reliable. And that it conformed to uniform standards so products were compatible with one another. He created these standards for safety, reliability and compatibility by convening groups of engineers, scientists, academics, experts and sometimes even journalists and philosophers – and asking them to balance public and private interests. He then worked with the producers of electric gadgets to implement those standards...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/07/us-government-artificial-intelligence-robert-reich

[SWBTATTReg]

1. This is just IMHO. Personally, I think that AI is already here, but we don't really see it yet,

being that such an AI entity, would be clever enough or obscure enough to remain undetected or not recognized. Work on AI has been underway for literally decades and decades, actually a dream of many programmers to create evolving software that would grow it's own code as needed, thus no longer requiring the legions of programmers to update/maintain the code.

Not really called AI then, but called, more or less, a self-modifying computer program which would take in its usual load of incoming data, and if data was detected that it never processed before, would automatically update the processing programs (via table updates or program updates (creating a new version of the processing programs)) spit out appropriate reports to highlight these new types of records, and then continue processing.

[appalachiablue]

2. It's been underway yes, and is here. I know that govts are using it of course

and I'll post a related article if I can locate it. Thanks for commenting.

[friend of a friend]

3. We will not know how powerful AI is until it is ready to take over.

I believe that even now we do not have any idea what it is capable of.