AI Regulation’s Champions Can Seize Common Ground—or Be Swept Aside
Published by The Lawfare Institute in Cooperation With
As AI whistleblowers speak out, safety advocates depart leading machine learning companies, and tech execs warn about AI-enabled superweapons, it’s easy to forget how quickly existential fears over artificial intelligence have become respectable. Of course, killer AI has long been a Hollywood trope—but for decades, only a handful of bloggers, academics, and autodidacts took the idea seriously. In the era of AlphaFold and ChatGPT, though, visions of all-powerful, uncontrollable AI no longer seem as far-fetched. Today, the so-called AI “doomers” get TED talks and New Yorker profiles, and their ranks are swelling with leading pundits, scholars, and billionaires. Their concerns are now firmly in the mainstream, taken seriously from billion-dollar boardrooms to the senior ranks of the federal government.
But not without controversy. Other prominent AI watchers and practitioners stress concrete problems that automation and machine learning are already causing, from the often-miserable working conditions of data laborers to the widespread use of AI for surveillance. Rather than dwelling on speculative catastrophes, many urge action on these immediate problems. These advocates often describe themselves as focused on AI ethics, fairness, and similar concerns; for lack of a better term, call them the “ethicists.”
