11/07/2023
📝Should AI be regulated?
When we create a new technology, we face new responsibilities. As Sundar Pichai claims: "Artificial Intelligence will have a more profound impact on humanity than fire, electricity and the internet," all of which noticeably have strong regulation from governments - so shouldn't AI be the same? Well, theoretically, yes definitely - if not more - however, governments are renowned for being slow to catch up with technology, most congressmen of the 115th Congress facing Mark Zuckerberg didn't even know how to work Facebook so should we seriously expect them to catch up with AI? Any regulation that they could create must have an extremely broad outlook, ranging from monopolies on finance to Human Rights protection, a big job for individual legislatures hence perhaps the responsibility lies with RTA's or even with the UN, protecting cybersecurity too and AI's use as a weapon.
The UN has already voiced its concern with AI, speaking of the need to curb any discrimination or equality it may cause, especially in gender or racial bias and law enforcement, stressing the importance of protection of privacy in its usage in surveillance. This isn't just shallow jargon, in 2021 UNESCO set the first ever global normative framework for it's 193 member states, with the aim of a federal-like regulation with basic conventions on responsibility and security whilst giving states the responsibility to apply such responsibilities at state level however, with the changing world order, this application of convention may have little affect on AI's actual implementation.
Whilst the text aims primarily to protect data within the AI firms - deja vu anyone? - the pace of the process of development in AI, especially within Quantum Machine Learning, may yield the need for greater clarity in its applications with basic Quantum Algorithms such as Shor's algorithm projecting a serious threat to global cybersecurity - catalysed by the inequality caused by the development of Quantum Computers by larger economies - but here, the likes of the UN and UNESCO do have a key role to play but the final leaders should be nations such as China, the US and the EU - real conventions begin at the source of the development of the subject being regulated.
AI is like a river, we are the fish within it. To us, the river cannot be stopped, the current is stronger than our ability to swim against it. We can only decide how we swim with the current, which direction we go and how deep we go; the more we try to work against the current, the weaker we become. As a global civilisation, humanity must come together and unite under the current with the same approach, otherwise we will just grow weak. Any legislation passed must provide the framework for AI to flow off of, not work against it.
