I am both a humanist (as a human how could one not be?) and a pragmatist, and thus far I have believed that limiting the pace of AI development would be both impossible to enforce and not necessarily a good idea. I still think it would be difficult to enforce, but I’ve changed my mind about whether it is the right thing to do. The drumbeat about the current and potential perils of AI has become louder and louder. Over the past few days, for example, there have been these stories in the online and mainstream press:
When AI Bots Start Bullying Humans Even Silicon Valley Gets Rattled
Something Big Is Happening (over 85 million views!)
AI Is Already Making Online Crimes Easier. It Could Get Much Worse
And these articles, all negative about the impact or potential of AI, were only in the past week. It no longer seems viable to stick your head in the sand about the negative impacts of AI on jobs, social life, political life, cybersecurity, non-AI software businesses, the environment, etc. Yes, there are some potential positive impacts as well—particularly in healthcare. I do think there is high potential to lower the cost and improve the quality of everyday healthcare, although there will no doubt be some negative impacts when AI freely dispenses health and treatment advice. And I would argue that current AI healthcare systems are already good enough to yield a major improvement in the quality and the cost of care if they were broadly implemented.
I’ve also been influenced by the increasing number of AI scientists who are trying to warn the world that the possibility for global damage from AI is too high. They include Nobelist Geoffrey Hinton, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, Berkeley AI pioneer Stuart Russell, and most recently Google DeepMind CEO (and another Nobelist) Demis Hassabis. He warned in an interview a few days ago that agentic AI poses particular risks of taking actions its creators didn’t intend and could get out of control. He argued for international cooperation to “set minimum standards before existing institutions are overwhelmed.” Several other prominent researchers at major AI vendors have recently resigned for safety and human alignment concerns.
OK, I’m convinced. In short, I’m ready to put on the brakes on AI. The fact that AI systems are now improving themselves and generating their own code has been a big factor in my increased concern. I’d like to see researchers and vendors stop making Ai systems smarter. I’d like to see agentic AI restricted from coming up with its own goals, or even its own means of achieving those goals. I’d like to see regulations that prevent it from doing harm. Let’s focus on implementing the AI we have, which is already plenty intelligent to power improvements in many business and organizational processes.
The obvious answer to slowing AI down and making it safer is government regulation. I don’t see the current US federal government issuing any AI safety regulation; Congress is dysfunctional, and the Trump administration is hell-bent on eliminating all regulation and beating China on AI. In the US, that means that states and even cities will have to regulate AI. It’s also obvious that having a patchwork of state- and city-based regulation is nutty, but until there are major changes in the federal government that may be the only regulatory remedy. California has already passed some AI legislation, one component of which focuses on the safety of foundation LLMs. Since OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all headquartered in California, maybe that legislation will have some impact. It hasn’t thus far, however. New York City has also enacted legislation about the use of AI in hiring (Local Law 144), but thus far it appears not to have been enforced.
It’s not surprising that if state regulation of AI is the only alternative in the US now, AI vendors and investors are lining up to fight it. Meta, for example, just announced that it was giving $65 million to two political action committees—one for Democrats, one for Republicans—to support anti-regulation candidates. Last summer, vendors and AI investors put even more millions into Leading the Future, another anti-AI regulation PAC. To their credit, Anthropic seems to be the only major AI vendor that is still advocating for regulation, although I’m sure they would prefer that it were federal rather than state-based.
Max Tegmark, the MIT physics professor who leads the Future of Life Institute, said at a Davos panel (video here) that he believes that openness to AI regulation is increasing. I hope he’s correct, but I am not quite as optimistic.
On the same panel, historian Yuval Hariri argued for an international agreement not to recognize AI as legal persons. That would mean that AI systems can’t have bank accounts, can’t own property, and can’t form corporations on their own. He feels that if even one country allows personhood, the global structure preventing AI-wreaked havoc would break down. Avoiding AI being corporations seems to me a good idea, but I am not sure we still have a structure to create and enforce international agreements. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, however, for the UN to take up the issue.
There is also the possibility of a consumer revolt—particularly in the US, where most citizens don’t trust AI already. The industry can only thrive if people use its products, and once potential consumers realize that AI can cost them their jobs, hurt their children, increase crime, nurture political conflict and even war—and perhaps kill us all, though I am not yet ready to envision that possibility—they may stop using it. Lack of use would perhaps slow down the whole industry and the somewhat crazy valuations and investment levels in AI vendors and data centers.
On the corporate side of AI consumption, I’ve been doing some research recently on the economic value that companies receive from AI. I’ll publish more about it soon. It does suggest that companies are starting to receive substantial value from AI, but only about half of the respondents in a global survey say they are getting “a great deal of value.” One interesting finding is that they say they are getting more value from analytical AI (which is less scary) than generative AI by a substantial margin. But if companies don’t get sufficient value and start spending less on AI—and the survey suggests that only a few plan to spend a lot more—that could slow the pace of AI research and development considerably.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I’m a pragmatist, and I’m not sure how an AI slowdown can be accomplished. But I am increasingly sure that it is desirable or even necessary.
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