Dangers of AI

There's a growing awareness of potential dangers of the rapid development of AI. Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's entry in her diary, "Letters from an American," which begins "On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models."

It goes on: "Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage." 

It's good that these things are coming to light, and there are discussions taking place about what action should be taken. Uncharacteristically, three major AI companies  -- Sam Altman's OpenAI, Elon Musk's xAI, and Demis Hassabis's Google DeepMind -- "all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements," and seem to be calling for government regulation of their own industries.

Biden set in place the basics for such regulation; Trump nullified Biden's efforts on Day 1 of his administration; and Trump and his sons are heavily invested in companies tied to the AI boom and are strongly opposed to regulation:

"On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for the 'Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.' The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of 'responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration' and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly.

"Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump’s order 'Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence' called for reviewing 'all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken' under Biden’s order and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. '[W]e must,' the order said, 'develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.'

"During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers 'the oil of the next 50 years' and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are 'Cash Cows,' creating taxes and jobs that 'amount to LIQUID GOLD!'”