GoKawiilSign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Email address Sign Up Thank you!
While the US appears to be further away from meaningful AI regulations than ever before, lawmakers certainly have plenty of ideas on how the country could go about setting meaningful rules.
It’s a particularly precarious moment as fears over rogue AI models wreaking havoc and endangering humanity continue to mount. Even tech leaders from the majority of frontier AI labs have started to coalesce around the idea that the industry has to slow down the development of the tech to get ahead of a possible catastrophe.
Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (VT-D) is intensifying his calls for a ban on the development of so-called superintelligent AIs — and he’s willing to go a lot further than some of his like-minded peers.
“Dario Amodei, Elon Musk and Sam Altman now agree that we must slow down the development of AI and ‘pace the frontier,'” he tweeted last week. “That’s a start, but it’s not enough.”
Sanders was referring to a lengthy essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that the industry should open its doors to third-party evaluators, establish common safety standards, and coordinate with other democracies around the world to enforce these standards.
“When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” Sanders added. “You hit the brakes.”
This month, the lawmaker announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which is legislation designed to “stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”
The bill, if enacted, would stop AI development “until a federal regulator has established safety rules.”
It would also set new penalties for anybody attempting to circumvent these rules. AI developers who try to build superintelligent AI anyway could be “subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.”
... continue reading