Elon Musk: regulate AI to combat 'existential threat' before it's too late
GuardianJul 17, 2017
The Facts
The US Dept. of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on Tuesday invited the public to comment on what role the federal government can play to ensure Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are behaving as they are intended and not causing harm.
The Biden admin.'s move comes amid a boom in the use of AI tools that can quickly generate writing, images, and videos designed to mimic human creation. OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT has reportedly reached 100M users faster than any consumer app in history.
The Spin
Narrative A
This is a responsible move by the administration. We cannot afford to waste time addressing the challenges posed by artificial intelligence. The development of this technology is unlike anything we've seen before, and incorrectly designed or managed artificial intelligence poses a fundamental risk to human civilization. We need to be proactive rather than reactive when regulating AI.
Narrative B
AI is the future, and pausing or otherwise trying to set back its development won't solve any problems. AI offers a revolutionary means to address some of the world's biggest challenges, including inequity and even climate change, and it must be used for this. Rather than trying to reign it in, we simply need to identify the tricky areas of the technology and work harder to improve them.
Nerd narrative
There's a 5% chance that the control problem (i.e. how to create AI that will benefit and avoid inadvertently harming its creators) will be solved before the creation of Artificial General Intelligence, according to the Metaculus prediction community.
