Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman once said:
There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change.
Yesterday, my colleague Mitch observed the tyranny of the status quo beginning to topple. It looks to me like the tide of public warnings has at last slammed into U.S. policymakers with enough force to overcome their usual inertia; Congress is seeing the crisis at last.
After a wave of autonomous cyberattacks by uncontrolled AI and Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic, a tsunami of AI news has hit my feed. So many voices have joined the call for action that I can practically assemble an entire article from the quotes.
Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Peggy Noonan writes:
There is no subject now but artificial intelligence. Nothing else is as crucial, nothing carries dangers so imminent or implications so great for the human future.
Fox News quotes Coxon himself, who made his stance clear in an interview on Wednesday:
This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created... I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past.
Columnist Gaby Hinsliff observes in The Guardian:
What’s happening in some frontier AI labs now is arguably the equivalent of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, but this time led by private companies in a mad dash for wealth and market dominance, not scientists under an elected government’s command. [...] It’s time for humans to stop and think about what we’re doing to ourselves – while we alone still have the power to do so.
In The New York Times, author Stephen Witt says:
Swarms of A.I.s are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests and even mounting assaults on other computers. A.I. has gone rogue.
I’ve spent the last month reporting on these incidents, and I am convinced that we need a global pause on A.I. research and development — now.
Also in The Guardian, writer and onetime McKinsey whistleblower Garrison Lovely adds:
The bill from Sanders and Casar to pause frontier AI development is a good first step. But as the lawmakers acknowledge, the US needs to work toward a bilateral agreement with Beijing.
Neither country has good reason to trust the other, which is why the deal should be monitored using verification techniques that don’t assume any good will.
I could hardly have said it better myself. The remarkable thing is that policymakers finally seem to be paying attention as well. As of now, around thirty Democrats and four or five Republicans have responded to acknowledge the insider warnings. Their proposals range from Congressional hearings to calls for a pause or slowdown.
One notable reaction is that of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who called Coxon’s warning “highly concerning” and recalled a podcast conversation in which Elon Musk gave him a 10-20% chance AI destroys humanity. Cruz added that we need to guard against “catastrophic risks” from AI; he tempered his call with concerns about China overtaking the U.S., but this is still the most concerned we’ve yet seen him.
Meanwhile, POLITICO reporters Riley Rogerson and Kelsey Brugger write of the risk AI could “kill us all”:
In conversations with POLITICO throughout the day Wednesday, more than a dozen lawmakers and aides from both parties said they were hopeful Congress would start taking the issue seriously.
The authors quote House Republican Mike Lawler of New York, calling it “one of the biggest issues that Congress has to tackle over the next two years,” while they point out that consensus is still lacking on what, exactly, Congress may do.
We’ve seen several bipartisan bills proposed, including an actual ban on superintelligence, though they’ve yet to gain much traction. With a narrow majority in the House and Senate, Republicans have the ball on taking the next steps and advancing this legislation. There are some signs of interest — Axios relays plans by House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring AI companies together to agree on safety guardrails — but more is necessary.
They’ll need to move faster and more decisively if Congress is to intervene in time. As psychologist Michael Noetel points out, the AI companies have their own motivated reasons to press onward despite the danger: the benefits are worth the risk, or we need to build superhuman AIs to study them, or someone else will do it if they don’t. We can’t rely on self-policing by rival companies in bitter competition; we won’t get a real solution to the crisis until governments put a stop to the race themselves.
A workable solution would need to involve the executive branch as well, particularly with a U.S.-China summit approaching this month. Yet the White House remains lukewarm on the extinction threat, with the president projecting a lack of concern to reporters.
As we’ve seen, awareness can strike with blinding speed when the conditions are right; but for now, it’s Congress that seems poised to take the next urgent steps. It’s a good time for constituents to join the call and demand they take the right ones.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.