A more immediate 'AI risk'

From: POLITICO's Digital Future Daily - Wednesday Aug 16,2023 08:02 pm
How the next wave of technology is upending the global economy and its power structures
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By Mark Scott

With help from Derek Robertson

WASHINGTON - OCTOBER 2: An exterior view of the White House is seen October 2, 2003 in Washington, DC. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans favored to appoint a special counsel in the case of the leak of a CIA agent's identity that is now being investigated by the Justice Department. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The White House. | Getty Images

Janet Haven doesn’t dismiss fears that artificial intelligence may cause an apocalypse.

She just doesn’t believe that’s the technology’s biggest existential threat.

Haven is the executive director of the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the social effects of data, automation and AI, and a member of the White House’s National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee. That group has met regularly since its creation last year, and published its inaugural annual report in May that called on the federal government to take a more hands-on approach to AI.

“I don’t discount the sort of longer-term existential threats and concerns that have been raised,” she told Digital Future Daily. “But they are discounting the immediate and very visible harms that are already part of our use of AI.”

Those concerns lie at the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of policymakers and politicians as everyone from Joe Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer, to Microsoft’s Brad Smith and Mozilla’s Mark Surman try to calm the public’s concerns that artificial intelligence will either take their jobs, revolutionize the American economy or, in the worst case scenario, end the world.

On one side are technological advocates who have called on Washington to mitigate the potential of AI to end the world, even if that possibility is decades away. On the other side are mostly human rights campaigners who want attention focused squarely on how algorithms — full of data biases — are harming Americans, now.

For Haven, politicians should look past the AI hype and focus on what real-world risks may result when everything from people’s Social Security benefits to housing allocations becomes automated via complex machine learning algorithms.

“Policymakers and politicians should be paying attention to the protections of fundamental rights, and the durability of any (AI) governance framework,” said Haven, who spent more than a decade working with the Open Society Foundations, a grant-making foundation focused on promoting human rights and social justice.

She points to the White House’s (much-maligned) Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, or regulatory guidance for federal agencies in how they oversaw the technology as examples of how officials can rein in the worst excesses of AI without limiting, too much, how companies roll out the technology. Those proposals, which immediately came under criticism from all sides for either being too onerous or not going far enough, included data privacy protections and efforts to stop algorithmic bias creeping into these AI systems.

Haven also urged Washington to not get caught up in the extensive corporate lobbying that has sprouted up over the last year in the wake of ChatGPT’s rise. She worried that policymakers have almost exclusively focused on so-called generative AI, which is only a small part of what wider AI systems are capable of. It also has led some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names to dominate a national conversation on AI, just as people’s attention has finally woken up to a technology that has been around for decades.

“The main public discourse understands AI as ChatGPT and that is a really narrow part of AI,” she said.

“It is also a type of AI that has been developed specifically to meet two objectives,” Haven added. “One: to push towards this imaginary artificial general intelligence, which is conceived of by a very small group of people. And two: it has been created to sell a product.”

So far, though, Haven’s near-term concerns have been somewhat disregarded by officials — both in the White House and on Capitol Hill — in favor of Armageddon-planning around the worst-case scenarios if AI really goes rogue. That’s especially true when many now in Washington view the technology’s development via the prism of America’s competition with China.

“The most bipartisan issue in Washington right now is being concerned about China,” she admitted. “That is dramatically impacting how AI governance is being discussed and rolled out.”

 

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a democrat's stablecoin strategy

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.).

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.). | Francis Chung/POLITICO

One House Democrat is playing the long game on stablecoin regulation.

Today’s edition of POLITICO’s Morning Money reported on the approach taken by Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), who voted against last month’s Republican-championed stablecoin bill in the House Financial Services Committee with the hope of influencing the process enough to introduce some bipartisan provisions.

His efforts include a letter he sent to PayPal this week asking for clarification about its recently-announced stablecoin offerings. It also includes figuring out what’s going on with his fellow members of Congress who, in his eyes, are proceeding without any real consistency on the existing stablecoin bill.

“Without naming names, there are members who are historically very thoughtful — who aren’t just sort of reflexively pro-crypto — who were supporting this and not making really good arguments about it,” Casten told MM. “I couldn’t quite figure out what’s going on there.” — Derek Robertson

more is more

Why is the future — and, increasingly, the present — so extreme?

Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the liberal think tank the Center for New Liberalism, tried to answer in a blog post this morning why, in his words, “everything online is going insane.” The answer in short: The very platforms that organize our digital lives are built to incentivize that insanity.

As a case in point, Johnson uses the example of MrBeast, the astronomically popular YouTuber who built his fame making a series of increasingly outlandish videos where he hands out large sums of money and performs eccentric stunts in public. The principle at play is the same whether it’s those innocuous pranks or the rise of extremist politicians: On social platforms, people will inevitably gravitate toward the most extreme version of what they’re looking for.

“...it’s not an accident that Trump’s style of constant controversy worked in 2016 when it would never have worked in decades before. Create conflict, espouse extreme views, and you’re likely going to be an online hit,” Johnson writes, before concluding that he doesn’t “think we can stop the dynamic, but individually we don’t have to be trapped by it.” — Derek Robertson

Tweet of the Day

It has been weird to live my life in the first era of human history where transportation has gotten slower. But it’s wonderful to be able to watch shows in “quick bites” on my phone

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