Microsoft\u2019s chief scientist has warned that Donald Trump\u2019s proposed ban on state-level guardrails on artificial intelligence will slow the development of the frontier technology rather than accelerate it.<\/p>\n
Dr Eric Horvitz, a former technology adviser to Joe Biden, said bans on regulation will \u201chold us back\u201d and \u201ccould be at odds with making good progress on not just advancing the science, but in translating it into practice\u201d.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has proposed a 10-year ban on US states creating \u201cany law or regulation limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems\u201d.<\/p>\n
It is driven in part by White House fears China could otherwise win the race to human-level AI, but also pressure from tech investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in Facebook, which argues<\/a> consumer uses should be regulated rather than research efforts. Its co-founder, the Trump donor Marc Andreessen, said earlier this month that the US was in a two horse race for AI supremacy with China. The US vice-president, JD Vance, recently said: \u201cIf we take a pause, does [China] not take a pause? Then we find ourselves \u2026 enslaved to [China]-mediated AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Horvitz said he was already concerned about \u201cAI being leveraged for misinformation and inappropriate persuasion\u201d and for its use \u201cfor malevolent activities, for example, in the biology biological hazard space\u201d.<\/p>\n Horvitz\u2019s pro-regulation comments came despite reports that Microsoft<\/a> is part of a Silicon Valley lobbying push with Google, Meta and Amazon, to support the ban on individual US states regulating AI for the next decade which is included in Trump\u2019s budget bill which is passing through Congress.<\/p>\n Microsoft is part of a lobbying drive to urge the US Senate to enact a decade-long moratorium on individual states introducing their own efforts to legislate, the Financial Times reported last week. The ban has been written into Trump\u2019s \u201cbig beautiful bill\u201d that he wants passed by Independence Day on 4 July.<\/p>\n Horvitz was speaking at a meeting of the the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence<\/a> on Monday when he said: \u201cIt\u2019s up to us as scientists to communicate to government agencies, especially those right now who might be making statements about no regulation, [that] this is going to hold us back.<\/p>\n \u201cGuidance, regulation \u2026 reliability controls are part of advancing the field, making the field go faster in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking at the same seminar, Stuart Russell, the professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said: \u201cWhy would we deliberately allow the release of a technology which even its creators say has a 10% to 30% chance \u2026 of causing human extinction? We would never accept anything close to that level of risk for any other technology.\u201d<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Business Today<\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n The apparent contradiction between Microsoft\u2019s chief scientist and reports of the company\u2019s lobbying effort comes amid rising fears that unregulated AI development could pose catastrophic risks to humanity and is being driven by companies prioritising short-term profit.<\/p>\n Microsoft has invested $14bn (\u00a310bn) in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, whose chief executive Sam Altman who this week predicted that: \u201cIn five or 10 years we will have great human robots and they will just walk down the street doing stuff \u2026 I think that would be one of the moments that \u2026 will feel the strangest.\u201d<\/p>\n Predictions of when human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be reached vary from a couple of years to decades. The Meta chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has said AGI could be decades away, while last week his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a $15bn investment in a bid to achieve \u201csuperintelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n Microsoft declined to comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Microsoft\u2019s chief scientist has warned that Donald Trump\u2019s proposed ban on state-level guardrails on artificial intelligence will slow…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,53,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-205185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-technology","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114727220889255692","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}