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Americans Want To Regulate AI But Don't Trust Anyone To Do It (technologyreview.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2018, several high-profile controversies involving AI served as a wake-up call for technologists, policymakers, and the public. The technology may have brought us welcome advances in many fields, but it can also fail catastrophically when built shoddily or applied carelessly. It's hardly a surprise, then, that Americans have mixed support for the continued development of AI and overwhelmingly agree that it should be regulated, according to a new study from the Center for the Governance of AI and Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. These are important lessons for policymakers and technologists to consider in the discussion on how best to advance and regulate AI, says Allan Dafoe, director of the center and coauthor of the report. "There isn't currently a consensus in favor of developing advanced AI, or that it's going to be good for humanity," he says. "That kind of perception could lead to the development of AI being perceived as illegitimate or cause political backlashes against the development of AI."

6 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Simple Solution by AdamStarks · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Create an AI to regulator!

  2. I know the perfect person! by zippo01 · · Score: 2

    My vote goes to John Connor!

  3. How do you even "regulate" AI? by the_skywise · · Score: 2

    There's not even standardized definitions of AI internals yet so I'm not sure how you write regulations that could easily be understood by those implementing the AI to begin with.
    Sure there's the old "don't be evil" (we see how that turned out) and non-military AI shouldn't kill but beyond that? So long as they're still subject to the laws and regulations of what a normal human would be doing that the AI replaces I'm not sure there's much else that can be done currently
    AIs should not cold call people after 8pm in their timezone.
    AIs should always say please and thank you
    I'm flashing back to that scene in Robocop 2 after the civics board got done adding 100 "prime" directives to his software.

    1. Re:How do you even "regulate" AI? by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      You really don't regulate it. You just get a bunch of useless chuckle fucks together that don't provide any real value and invariably end up being corrupted by monied interests. So you ultimately end up with the least morally scrupulous companies doing what they want anyway, but now the tax payer has to foot the bill for some additional useless paper pushers.

  4. Re:AI nutters by suutar · · Score: 2

    I don't know if people think "real AI" (insert your definition here) really exists, but there's certainly some "the computer makes the decision, humans just get to see the results" in play, and in some cases the humans don't know enough about the current state of the innards of the black box to be able to predict the decision. I'm not worried about robot revolution, but I am somewhat concerned that folks will get turned down for loans, insurance, what have you for reasons that no human can explain, validate, and/or correct.

  5. Confusing by Visarga · · Score: 2

    The term AI is confusing. They should have asked individually about: face recognition, self driving cars, automated shops, machine translation, voice assistants, ML based genetic research, content recommendation/filtering systems and so on. Then people would have given more precise answers. But if you frame it with the term AI, people think Terminator and Skynet.