On June 8, Republicans adopted a new party platform ahead of a possible second term for former President Donald Trump. Buried among updated policy positions on abortion, immigration and crime, the document contains a provision that worries some artificial intelligence experts: It promises to revoke President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI.
“We will revoke Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that impedes innovation in AI and imposes radical leftist ideas on the development of this technology,” the statement said. platform read.
Biden executive order on AI, signed last October, sought to address threats that new technologies could pose to civil rights, privacy and national security, while promoting innovation and competition and the use of AI for public services. It requires developers of the most powerful AI systems to share the results of their security tests with the U.S. government and calls on federal agencies to develop guidelines for the responsible use of AI domains such as criminal justice and federal benefits. Software.
See more information: Why Biden’s AI Executive Order Only Goes So Far
Carl Szabo, vice president of the industry group NetChoice, which counts Google, Meta and Amazon among its members, welcomes the possibility of repealing the executive order, saying, “It would be good for Americans and innovators.”
“Instead of imposing existing rules that can be applied to AI technology, Biden’s Executive Order only forces bureaucrats to create new and complex burdens on small businesses and innovators trying to enter the market. Overregulation like this risks derailing AI’s incredible potential for progress and ceding America’s technological advantage to competitors like China,” Szabo said in a statement.
However, recent polls shared exclusively with TIME indicate that Americans on both sides of the political aisle are skeptical that the US will avoid regulating AI in an effort to outcompete China. According to research conducted in late June by the AI Policy Institute (AIPI), 75% of Democrats and 75% of Republicans believe that “taking a careful and controlled approach” to AI is preferable to “advancing AI as much as possible.” quickly as possible to be the first country to obtain extremely powerful AI.”
Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for Safe AI, says: “AI safety and national security risks are bipartisan issues. Poll after poll shows that Democrats and Republicans want AI safety legislation.”
Read more: US voters value safe AI development over race against China, poll shows
The proposal to remove the guardrails established by Biden’s executive order runs counter to broad public support for a measured approach to AI and has raised concern among experts. Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute and former senior advisor on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, says Biden’s order was “one of the greatest achievements of the last decade in AI policy” and that canceling the order would “I feel like going back to ground zero. Kak says Trump’s promise to support AI development rooted in “human flourishing” is a subtle but pernicious departure from more established frameworks like human rights and civil liberties.
Ami Fields-Meyer, former White House senior policy adviser on AI who worked on Biden’s executive order, says, “I think Trump’s message on AI is, ‘You’re on your own,’” referring to how repealing the executive order would do away with provisions designed to protect people from bias or unfair decision-making by of AI.
TechNet and several think tanks and technology lobbyists have criticized against the executive order since its introduction, arguing it could stifle innovation. In December, venture capitalist and prominent AI investor Ben Horowitz criticized efforts to regulate “math, FLOPs, and R&D,” alluding to computing limits established by Biden’s executive order. Horowitz said his company would “support like-minded candidates and oppose candidates who seek to destroy America’s advanced technological future.”
Although Trump has already accused technology companies like Google, Amazon and Twitter to work against him in June, speaking at Logan Paul’s podcast, Trump said “tech guys” in California gave him $12 million for his campaign. “They gave me a lot of money. They never liked doing that,” Trump said.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Even if Trump is re-elected and revokes Biden’s executive order, some changes will not be felt immediately. Most leading AI companies awake voluntarily sharing security testing information with governments at an international AI summit in Seoul last May, meaning that the removal of information-sharing requirements under the executive order may not have an immediate effect on national security. But Field-Meyer says: “If the Trump campaign believes that the stringent national security safeguards proposed in the executive order are radical liberal ideas, this should be a cause for concern for all Americans.”
Field-Meyer says the back-and-forth over the executive order underscores the importance of passing federal AI legislation, which would “bring a lot more stability to AI policy.” Currently there are more 80 notes related to AI in Congress, but it seems unlikely that any of them will become law in the near future.
Sandra Wachter, professor of technology regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, says Biden’s executive order was “a seminal step towards ensuring ethical AI and is very much in line with global developments in the UK, EU, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and the rest of the world.” She says she fears the law will be repealed before it has a chance to have a lasting impact. “It would be a very big loss and a big missed opportunity if the framework were tossed out and AI governance was reduced to a partisan issue,” she says. “This is not a political problem, it is a human problem — and a global one. in that.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
