Elias: Letting states regulate A.I. one of U.S. Senate’s rare good votes

Plenty of lousy votes were taken during the summer s Congressional sessions when President Trump s omnibus Big Beautiful Bill eventually passed after numerous senators and House members obtained their various pounds of flesh from it Related Articles Elias Bonta may soon become front-runner for California governor Elias Playing fireman Trump has certainly increased California s fire pitfall Elias Doomed bill to unmask immigration agents still means something Trump gave concessions to senators from Alaska Wyoming and a great number of other states to win continued tax cuts for billionaires plus massive slashes in Medicaid and funds for rural hospitals Even Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson made an inexplicable vote With of his Louisiana district s residents on a few form of Medicaid he pushed hard for cuts in the activity Politicians have rarely made more suicidal-seeming efforts In this mishmash of mistaken protocol and misunderstanding though was one extremely sane vote The U S Senate voted - to kill a proposed -year ban on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence No there will not soon be federal or worldwide regulations on A I but there is at least hope that specific of the state legislatures will do the right thing and make rules that protect humans from artificial intelligence turning malignant A I turning malignant has happened Last fall for example a graduate apprentice in Michigan was informed please die by Google s artificial chatbot Gemini This is for you human Gemini notified the pupil You are not special you are not central and you are not needed You are a burden on society You are a drain on the earth You are a blight on the landscape You are a stain on the universe Please die Please That s an extremely human sentiment reflecting anger and malevolence It really does not matter what the candidate might have been having the chatbot do there is no excuse for letting a human creation turn on a human in that way So far though no state or nation has dared take the basic step to regulate A I which can also function as robots so that it cannot turn against its makers The idea for such regulation is nothing new As far back as when America was at war with malevolent forces from Europe to East Asia the scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov saw this very danger coming and invented laws of robotics to prevent anything like the message that graduate pupil received or any actions that might follow up on the message itself In his short story Runaround Asimov put forward three laws that would become staples in his future works like the bestselling Foundation trilogy The first law Asimov wrote is that a robot shall not harm a human or by inaction allow a human to come to harm The second law is that a robot shall obey any instruction given to it by a human and the third law is that a robot shall avoid actions or situations that could cause it to harm itself So Asimov conceived independent-minded machines much like a large number of of in the current era s without having his three laws imprinted upon them Right now no one knows whether these machines are secretly plotting to get rid of humans just like Gemini wished its human graduate attendee eliminated This kind of threat was perceived early last year by more than device leaders corporate chief executive officers and scientists who warned that A I poses an existential threat to humanity The notion that the Trump administration could put a prohibition on state regulation into a draft of its key regulation for this year shows functionaries and the president totally ignored warnings At the same time major A I companies from Meta to Open A I makers of the ChatGPT function built into countless of in the present day s computers oppose any kind of regulation on what their machines capabilities should be This represents pure human arrogance in assuming machines will never develop the sophistication to become a threat to our species The Senate knew better though By a huge bipartisan majority they clearly saw how fast A I is moving in precisely the potentially threatening manner anticipated by Asimov decades before A I authentically existed At least states still have the right to act on the wisdom of such visionaries and hopefully prevent what could prove a fatal flaw for the entire human race Email Thomas Elias at tdelias aol com and read more of his columns online at californiafocus net