Introducing Artificial Intelligence (AI): a new wave of parasitic intelligence infiltrating modern textbooks and creating a persistent challenge for educators worldwide as they strive to navigate its complexities and mitigate its potential threats.
However, the threats that AI might pose outside the classroom are a much bigger consideration, and might it be too late to impose regulation as AI evolves without any serious limits or oversight? The primary challenge in regulating AI lies in the steep costs required for dedicated advisories, as well as the moral complications surrounding what constitutes a serious threat.Â
In California, the 8% cut to state operations is one key variable which encouraged Newsom’s blocking of an AI safety bill. Since 2020, the US has run a large deficit in the wake of COVID-19, with lower economic output and spikes in unemployment, it has placed the American economy under a dark cloud.Â
Biden has sought to alleviate this financial burden, pledging to slim the federal deficit by $3 trillion over the next 10 years. So, why discuss the broader economy? To better understand the context behind the government’s inaction on AI proliferation and apparent lack of urgency, despite reports from experts warning of the immediate dangers posed by AI.
National spending should be reduced where possible, and commensurately budget cuts and more austere governance have become the fashion globally after the largesse of the Covid era. When a threat is regarded as mid or long-term, cost-cutting measures are often deemed justified. As a result, policies that do not provide immediate societal benefits are deprioritised.Â
At present, AI is one of many issues that should be a core policy focus. However, it is often sidelined due to its perceived limited economic value and lack of immediate threat, having fallen prey to similar grievances as the climate change agenda - both facing severe underestimation despite their potentially catastrophic impacts.Â
AI poses potentially critical threats, even in its infancy, and its capacity to harm must be carefully managed, particularly where it concerns the production of information that could impact national and indeed individual security. Widespread dissemination of false information complicates the intelligence gathering and analysis process, which is already burdened with vast amounts of data for analysts to evaluate.Â
Regulating AI would enhance the efficiency of intelligence services by mitigating the sophisticated manipulation of images and communications. These doctored materials, which become increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality each year, have even deceived respected media outlets when created with human assistance. AI’s advanced capabilities amplify this challenge.Â
As AI metastasises practically uncontrollably, so will the spread of false information, and its ability to fool the public, media, and eventually states - the entities responsible for safeguarding society against threats posed by this new information era.Â
Nations are increasingly reliant on intelligence for defence, with AI an unpredictable and easily instrumentalisable tool, adversarial states may use intelligence tools offensively to provoke misjudgement and manipulate defending states into strategic errors. The implications this could have as far as tarnishing democratic integrity goes is of great concern.
Regulating AI presents a unique challenge due to its fluid, intangible, dispersed nature. The almost exponential development of AI capabilities confront regulators with the alarming reality of AI, which is that it has access to both the vast repository of the internet, and library of human input to refine its capabilities. Policymakers, often out of touch with technological and intelligence needs, may have outmoded understandings and commensurately inadequate ideas when it comes to AI.Â
AI’s potential to influence voting behaviour through targeted, populist messaging could create monumental electoral distortions and upend faith in elections, as previous applications of cutting edge technology has done. This technology may produce a pseudo-spiritual replacement in secular democracies, where people gravitate towards ideologies as a substitute for religion, fulfilling a deep-seated need to connect with a grand societal idea. Due to AI’s unparalleled power to systematically mobilise change on a global scale, it could exacerbate ideological divides. The implications of such a shift are vast and could be devastating, which only substantiates the need for regulation of the runaway train that is Artificial Intelligence.
Image: LinkedIn/Junghyun Chae
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