Joe Rogan's suggestion that artificial intelligence (AI) could play a larger role in government decision-making has prompted concern from an AI ethics expert. Governments, militaries and business leaders are already using AI tools for analysis and decision support, raising questions about how much authority such systems should have over high-stakes choices. Rogan's comments arrived amid a growing discussion about whether AI can help solve complex political and geopolitical problems more effectively than human leaders.
At the same time, researchers and ethicists are warning that increasing reliance on AI risks weakening human judgment and accountability in critical decisions. Newsweek reached out to Rogan's representative via email for comment on Sunday. Professor Shannon Vallor, Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and AI at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures, told Newsweek that the idea of AI playing a significant role in government is no longer theoretical.
"It’s very realistic," she said, arguing that decision-making and analysis are already being delegated to AI across a range of institutions, including military organizations. According to Vallor, this trend extends beyond government. She pointed to surveys showing many CEOs in the United States and United Kingdom are increasingly turning to AI chatbots for decision support, adding that political leaders are adopting similar practices.
For example, earlier this year, market research agency 3Gem found that out of 200 UK CEOs surveyed, 62 percent use AI to make their decisions. She also cited recent reports suggesting AI failures have contributed to serious international security incidents, including Bloomberg's report that overreliance on AI was a factor in the February 28 bombing of Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran. During a recent conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcast host suggested that sufficiently advanced AI could potentially make more rational decisions than humans by analyzing vast amounts of information without the emotional, partisan or personal biases that often shape politics.
"The problem is always leaders," Rogan said. "It's not that human beings inherently want to go to war with people they don't know from another part of the world." He added: "It sounds like a crazy hope, but my hope is that as AI becomes more and more omnipresent, as we start farming off various tasks to it, one of the things that we're gonna farm off is government." "Imagine a war where it stops. All war stops on the planet." While the discussion around AI often focuses on technical reliability, Vallor has said a deeper danger lies in what happens to human decision-makers when they become overly dependent on automation.
She said that regularly outsourcing judgment to AI could lead to what she called "cognitive deskilling," reducing people's ability to think critically and evaluate complex situations for themselves. Vallor said this process could also create "moral deskilling," where leaders become less capable of weighing the human consequences of their actions because they have grown accustomed to deferring difficult choices to machines. In matters involving war and conflict, she said that raised profound ethical concerns.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
