Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the Senate examined the risks of artificial intelligence-caused “doomsday scenarios” Wednesday at the latest AI Insight Forum.
At the final pair of forums on Wednesday, industry experts offered their suggestions for how to install appropriate guidelines for the technology to stop specific threats to U.S. interests. The first panel dealt with doomsday scenarios and how to mitigate them, while the second shifted to how AI could be used to augment national security. While many AI experts have spoken out about the risk that AI poses to civilization, the panelists brought a calmer approach, Schumer told reporters.
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“It would be easy in a binary fashion to characterize the risk as either ‘doomsday level’ or ‘not doomsday level,'” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), one of the senators helping Schumer organize the forums, told reporters. “But really, there are many gradations in between and to the extent we can come up with not just a vocabulary but also a methodology for measuring the different risk levels.”
The panelists at the “Doomsday” event included Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan, OpenAI’s head of preparedness Aleksander Madry, Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter, and several others.
There was a clear divide between panelists on the extent of the risks, attendees claimed. Some were more convinced of the existential threat posed by artificial general intelligence, or AI being smarter than the average human. Others were more skeptical of such an AI coming to exist in the near term.
The discussion focused on identifying doomsday scenarios and providing legislative suggestions to preemptively stop a Chernobyl-level problem from arising.
“There’s a general acknowledgment that even today, there are challenges that need to be addressed,” Malo Bourgon, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told the Washington Examiner. This includes passing policies to handle “near-term” issues, such as misinformation in the 2024 elections, and long-term ones, like “superintelligence.”
The second forum focused on national defense. The panel was more straightforward, attendees claimed, focusing on the necessity of investing in AI to keep up with China and ensuring companies had the funding required to compete and the incentives to stay in the U.S.
Panelists included Aerospace Industries Association CEO Eric Fanning, Center for a New American Security co-founder Michele Flournoy, and former Sen. Rob Portman.
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Schumer advertised the forums as an opportunity for Congress to understand AI and its technological implications properly. Previous forums addressed the technology’s impact on the workforce, high-impact industries, election security, privacy, transparency, and “transformative innovation.”
These will be the final two forums for 2023. Schumer intends to have the various committees begin writing and introducing legislation to establish guardrails in early 2024. The Senate majority leader did not state if he intends to host additional panels next year.
