Make no mistake: The greatest threat from emerging advances in artificial intelligence like ChatGPT isn’t that AI will take all our jobs or kill us (or both).
The former is ahistorical, the latter science fiction.
Rather, the big danger around AI is that overeager Washington policymakers will rush to regulate a fast-evolving technology.
Without a firm understanding of possible harms, we shouldn’t risk slowing a technology with vast potential to make America richer, healthier, more militarily secure and more capable of dealing with problems such as climate change and future pandemics.
Tech progress delayed is tech progress denied.
But the deep downsides of delay apparently don’t compute for the Biden White House.
The president’s new executive order on AI is a massive escalation of government intervention into the American technology sector.
Biden aide Bruce Reed calls it an “aggressive strategy,” which is no exaggeration.
The Biden order moves beyond previous voluntary AI commitments from Silicon Valley by using the Defense Production Act to force companies to share the results of its internal “red team” safety tests with Washington.
Moreover, explains tech-policy analyst Adam Thierer, the order would allow federal agencies to subtly transform voluntary guidelines into a firm regulatory framework, especially given congressional AI inaction.
And the order’s endorsement for the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission to increase its AI focus raises huge overreach concerns considering the FTC’s broad powers and Khan’s ideological eagerness to use them against America’s biggest tech companies.
In short, the order suggests nothing more than a wholesale abandonment of the light-regulatory approach toward American digital markets that created a world where all the most important Internet players are American companies.
Had President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s issued such an aggressive and sweeping order — instead of opting for a lighter approach — it’s possible we wouldn’t be witnessing today’s embryonic AI revolution.
It’s worth a moment to step back and consider what this revolution might bring us.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of a notable and ongoing slowdown in tech-driven US labor productivity growth, what I term the “Great Downshift” in my new book, “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.”
Output per worker is the most important factor affecting the rise in long-term living standards. And tech progress is the most important factor affecting output per worker.
Without the downshift, Americans would be as much as 50% richer today.
Yet if you listen to experts from Silicon Valley technologists to Wall Street economists, AI has the potential to supercharge productivity growth and generate a Great Upshift.
As the economics team at Goldman Sachs comments in a new report, “The development of capable AI is likely to be among the most consequential macroeconomic stories of the 21st century,” in part by automating some things workers do and making workers more productive at other tasks.
And that doesn’t even take into account the effect AI could have on accelerating scientific research.
If AI can automate parts of the research process, like searching through possible combinations of ideas, it could greatly increase the rate of technological innovation and trigger extremely rapid or unbounded economic growth, explain economists Philip Trammell of Oxford University and Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia in their new working paper “Economic Growth under Transformative AI.”
We don’t want to get regulation wrong. And given how early it is — ChatGPT was released by OpenAI only last November — it remains unclear exactly which problems are the biggest ones and how they should be dealt with.
While many AI worriers focus on sci-fi scenarios, hasty rulemaking may overshadow concerns like copyright and privacy or limiting competition.
Few firms today can craft advanced AI models, and quick regulations might favor established giants like Microsoft and Google, sidelining newcomers.
That some big companies want Washington to step in is hardly surprising.
And it’s not as if AI is some Wild West given that its products are currently subject to myriad consumer-protection laws, not to mention our famously active legal system.
New regulations will require time, research and experimentation, meriting government research funding.
For now, we shouldn’t hinder the potential benefits of this technological leap. If time is of the essence, a federally funded moonshot on AI safety would be worth consideration.
Meanwhile, it’s best to keep working the problem and learning on the fly, dealing with specific issues as they manifest.
James Pethokoukis is an economic policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, CNBC contributor and author of the new book “The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.” You can also read his newsletter, “Faster, Please!” on Substack.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
