If you were wondering who’s going to stop AI from gaining consciousness, going rogue and messing with the nuclear codes ... or turning off the electric grid ... or shutting down air traffic control, I have some good news. The answer is Donald Trump. As AI executives and researchers — so, the people who are actually building the things — warn that increasingly powerful systems may require stronger oversight, the president has an innovative solution.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for slowing the development of the technology to give governments and companies time to work out how to make it safer. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and even Elon Musk have also backed greater scrutiny. Microsoft has published its own code of conduct intended to ensure humans remain in control.
And the president of the United States has let us all know that a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” is all it will actually take, something we apparently have “in spades.” There are a number of things to say about this. First of all: Don’t take everything the AI developers say as fact. They have a vested interest in presenting their own technology as dangerously powerful, so cutting-edge it’s frightening, and so on.
They are all competing for high-level government contracts and other such commercial opportunities. Loudly stating that they are horrified by the huge potential of what they’ve made is a marketing choice as much as anything else. (Nevertheless, they have a point. This is a fast-moving technology that has completely reshaped the world in the past couple of years.
We do need laws around it.) Second of all: This is vintage Trump. Coming from a world in which bravado can stand in for expertise, he is a president who has always believed in a government where one man can be the guardrail for everything. This will hardly come as a shock as anyone who has seen the AI slop he’s also put out on Truth Social, presenting himself alternately as a king dropping refuse bombs on protesters and as Jesus Christ himself (sorry, I mean “a doctor.”) Trump wants to be the one and only in everybody’s lives.
To state the absolutely obvious, a guardrail is supposed to be something that exists independently of the person driving the car. It is there because people are fallible: They get tired, make mistakes, panic, misjudge a corner. The point of building a guardrail is not to find a sufficiently brilliant driver and then dispense with the barrier altogether.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
