Trump Rejects EO on AI
The draft Executive Order that Trump abruptly rejected last Thursday would have expanded federal power under the guise of pre-screening AI. Trump was right to cancel a blue-ribbon ceremony scheduled at the White House to sign this, which the heads of leading AI companies including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg had found excuses not to attend.
The draft Executive Order has been leaked to the media, and it’s a Deep State doozy. Using AI slop like “Secure Frontier Model Deployment” and “covered frontier model,” the EO would have expanded federal power that is already far too great.
The EO would have prioritized prosecution for anyone who uses AI, empowering the federal police state which should be downsized instead. The EO would make the Department of War, which lacks any AI expertise, a Big Brother over all new AI breakthroughs by asking AI developers to submit to the Feds their innovations “for a period of up to 90 days before they plan to release such models to other trusted partners.”
“Other trusted partners”? The Deep State attempted, through the EO, to become the foremost trusted partner of AI developers, so that the federal government would receive all new AI developments in advance of everyone else.
This program would start as voluntary, but what begins as a voluntary government program usually becomes mandatory. The EO would have placed AI development under federal supervision, which has never been done before for any emerging industry.
The federal bureaucracy in D.C. is corrupt beyond repair. Giving it any authority over AI innovations, even if initially voluntary as the Executive Order proposed, would be an invitation to interfere with and thwart beneficial developments.
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Thankfully, Trump said he was unhappy with the proposed EO and refused to sign it. The approach taken by whoever wrote it should be discarded and not revived in any form.
Military uses of AI are only a small part of its future, and the prominent AI developer Anthropic walked away from its profitable business with the Department of War rather than cave in to its demands that Anthropic remove ethical restrictions on its use. The War Department might take control of AI developments by declaring them to be national security risks, thereby stifling innovation without justification.
Rather than lobby the Department of War for business, a co-founder of Anthropic was at the Vatican, urging the Pope to include ethical limitations on the use of AI in his religious teachings. On Monday Pope Leo released a 42,300-word encyclical letter that condemned unethical uses of AI by militaries and to undermine jobs, and appeared to contain some of Anthropic’s ideas.
Graduating college students appear to agree with the Pope’s criticisms of AI, as commencement speakers were nearly booed off the stage whenever they praised AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was remarkably booed for minutes on May 15 during his speech at the University of Arizona graduation.
The booing was not limited to the Big Tech billionaires who are presumably profiting from AI. Boos greeted a music executive, Scott Borchetta, when he said about AI in his speech to Middle Tennessee State University, “It’s a tool. Make it work for you.”
Boos were the students’ response to even a real estate executive, Gloria Caulfield, when she told University of Central Florida graduates that AI is the “next industrial revolution.” College graduates are upset at the loss of jobs due to AI, and how their resumes are filtered by AI now rather than being read by real recruiters.
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple who was the brains behind the engineering in its early products, has never put dollars above people and only he drew applause for his remarks to graduates about AI. “You all have AI—actual intelligence.”
“I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain,” Wozniak added. It “takes nine months,” he said, referring to the time we all spend in our mother’s womb.
Outside of college, ordinary folks are furious at how AI is causing unwanted data centers to build on hundreds of acres in their small communities, blighting the landscape, soaking up scarce water, and overloading the energy grid. In Festus, Missouri, a small town near St. Louis, citizens have initiated recall petitions against the mayor and three councilmen who approved a mammoth data center there.
The federal government is investing $2 billion in quantum computing, which is another reckless high-tech boondoggle. AI benefits from trillions of dollars in private investments, and there should not be any federal or local subsidies for AI at taxpayer expense.
Many feel that Covid was caused by taxpayer-funded gain-of-function research, which escaped from a laboratory. Actual intelligence should take priority over the artificial kind.
John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.
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