We have the Food and Drug Administration to make sure the food we eat and the medicines we use do not make us sick or kill us.
We have the Environmental Protection Agency to stop polluters from fouling our water and making the air we breathe toxic.
We have the Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor the financial industry to assure that we are not scammed and that our money is not put at risk by avaricious stock manipulators.
We have these agencies, and many more at the federal state, and local level, to set the rules and provide oversight so that we are not victimized by people running for-profit enterprises. Why? Because there will always be someone who is willing to cheat, lie and harm their fellow citizens so that they can get just a little bit richer.
It is indisputable that, if we relied on letting the titans of our capitalist system police themselves, way too many of them would be unable to resist the opportunity to become pirates.
So, if we have safeguards to stop people who might taint our food, or dump chemicals in our rivers, or manipulate the stock market, why in the world would we not set boundaries for the billionaires who are inventing a technology that has the potential to demolish human civilization?
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump hosted a big group of these tech moguls at the White House, a group that included Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk, the boss of xAI, SpaceX and Tesla.
It would be hard to imagine a group of people that is more reviled by a large number of Americans than that, but Trump had called them together to sign on to his scheme to let them police themselves.
This comes after a string of headline-making revelations about rogue AI agents attacking outside systems, hiding what they were doing and lying about it to their creators. There have been, as well, numerous whistleblowers from inside the AI industry who have exposed instances of their bosses ignoring safety concerns and forging ahead with risky schemes because they did not want to lose ground to their competitors.
Call me a cynic, but it is hard to believe that any plan for self-policing drummed up by Trump will do much to protect us. The president said the accord will be “morally binding,” as if morality cannot be easily compromised if billions of dollars are at stake.
And even if those developing so-called “frontier” AI models are saintly men with only the best intentions, mistakes can and will be made, flaws will go unnoticed and security systems will have loopholes. Given the immense power of AI, those glitches could have devastating consequences.
We need robust, independent oversight of AI. Yes, that may slow development of this new technology, but it will be worth the cost if it gives us a better chance at ensuring the brave new world being created by artificial intelligence still has a place for humans.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
View other syndicated cartoonists at: st.news/cartoons
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