🧭 Congress's big AI report: Direction matters more than details

The US needs to regulate more for AI's potential benefits rather than just possible harms

Quote of the Issue

“… Pan’s opinions on social issues had grown more and more influential. He believed that technological progress was a disease in human society. The explosive development of technology was analogous to the growth of cancer cells, and the results would be identical: the exhaustion of all sources of nourishment, the destruction of organs, and the final death of the host body. He advocated abolishing crude technologies such as fossil fuels and nuclear energy and keeping gentler technologies such as solar power and small-scale hydroelectric power. He believed in the gradual de-urbanization of modern metropolises by distributing the population more evenly in self-sufficient small towns and villages.” - Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

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The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised

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The Essay

🧭 Congress's big AI report: Direction matters more than details

If you want a short-cut way to gauge the new (and much-awaited) report on artificial intelligence from a bipartisan Senate working group, A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy, just check out the Down Wing activist reaction. The people I would want to hate the document … seem to really hate it. Which is great, great news. This from Fight for the Future is a good example of the caterwauling:

[Sen. Charles] Schumer’s new AI framework reads like it was written by Sam Altman and Big Tech lobbyists. It’s heavy on flowery language about ‘innovation’ and pathetic when it comes to substantive issues around discrimination, civil rights, and preventing AI-exacerbated harms. The framework eagerly suggests pouring Americans’ tax dollars into AI research and development for military, defense, and private sector profiteering. Meanwhile, there’s almost nothing meaningful around some of the most important and urgent AI policy issues like the technology’s impact on policing, immigration, and worker’s rights. There is no serious discussion of open source in the document, exposing a strong bias toward Big Tech dominance in the AI space. None of this is all that surprising given that companies like Clearview AI, Microsoft, and Amazon got far more air time during the process of creating this report than human rights groups and AI policy experts. It seems that lawmakers in DC are less interested in regulating responsibly and more interested in rubbing elbows with CEOs and currying favor with those who stand to profit from unfettered AI. This roadmap leads to a dead end.

That sort of statement is about what I would expect from a group pushing what is, unfortunately, the dominant framework for AI regulation. It’s one focused primarily on the risks and harms of AI — a view that gave us the call for an immediate AI “pause” — while neglecting the potential benefits. This "AI wrongs" framework emphasizes safeguards against the risks of AI — bias, discrimination, privacy violations, and algorithmic errors — while paying little attention to the potential benefits of AI. Be afraid, be very afraid.

The Senate report emerges from an effort that originated last year in what The Washington Post describes as a senatorial “huddling with tech CEOs, civil rights leaders and top researchers to develop an ‘all hands on deck plan to address the urgent threats posed by artificial intelligence.” Back then, the discussion of AI issues was in full dystopian mode where the supposedly “reasonable” approach was anything short of the AI Pause. As tech policy analyst Adam Thierer recalls:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that took place on May 16th of last year, lawmakers and witnesses used apocalyptic rhetoric and proposed comprehensive regulatory controls on algorithmic systems. One Senator at the hearing that day suggested that any discussion about these issues should begin with the assumption that AI wants to kill us. Proposals on the table at that hearing included new AI-specific regulatory agencies, national and international licensing regimes, massive new liability for AI companies, and a variety of other sweeping regulatory proposals.

But the fever seems to have broken in Washington, at least for now, much to the dismay of the biggest AI worriers. A few takeaways: