The Biggest AI Risk May Be the Rush to Regulate It

Rikki Schlott

AI is on everybody’s mind right now, and for good reason. Tech executives are begging for regulation. Lawmakers are scrambling to find solutions. Regular people are picketing data centers. And the Trump administration is embracing an “America First” approach.

It’s entirely disorienting trying to make sense of a technology that’s developing this quickly, so I turned to the experts. 

In my most recent column for the New York Post, I wrote about a conversation I mediated between an AI optimist, University of Washington Professor and AI entrepreneur Oren Etzioni, and an AI doomer, MIT Professor Max Tegmark. Despite their differences, both agreed that AI should be regulated. But there were several points of interest to me as a libertarian that might also be of interest to you.

In particular, I asked the pair about the rush to regulate AI and the burst of populist energy surrounding the issue. I was interested to ask them because Tegmark had just hosted a Pro-Human Conference this month that brought together the likes of Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. Etzioni’s response was especially interesting:

Rikki Schlott: I’m pretty libertarian in my orientation, and I’m suspicious of when everyone all of a sudden becomes very populist and passionate about an issue. And I think that oftentimes in history, that doesn’t lead to the best possible solutions. And especially as we’re talking about China and other nations being involved in this race, how do we make sure that we orient what I think is a really valid and popular concern that I share towards productive solutions and not appeals to populism or quick fixes that are not really adequate or could potentially backfire?

Oren Etzioni: There’s a famous line that democracy is a terrible system; it’s just better than all the other ones. But I’m terrified of what the democratic process does, particularly when it sets its mind to regulate something that we don’t understand, particularly when it does so out of fear and fear that’s being fanned by … cynical forces at play. 

I am terrified [of] this process becoming a political hobby horse, which politicians will cynically manipulate to their own ends, which typically are getting elected and, in the case of more and more officials, also lining their pockets. So we need to have good solutions, not popular ones.… I worry more about human stupidity than about artificial intelligence. 

I also asked the two professors about how they made sense of the Hugging Face swarm attack, where they see us in the coming years, how to think about China’s artificial intelligence trajectory, and what, if any, regulations they think are called for in the age of AI. The full hour-long conversation is available to watch on the New York Post’s YouTube channel.

(Note: The photo accompanying this post is a screenshot from the New York Post’s YouTube channel.)