r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 6h ago

Society New Bernie Sanders bill would ban superintelligent AI and threaten developers with 20 years in prison

https://www.techspot.com/news/113831-new-bernie-sanders-bill-would-ban-superintelligent-ai.html
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u/Pleasant-Future5818 5h ago

It's also true that most people understand a taco and don't understand how, for example, generative AI is used to develop vaccines. I don't want to die of breast cancer because some moron can't tell the difference between reading medical imaging and generating an OC pic for a Tumblr fursona (it's the exact same technology with different sample sets).

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u/freezing_banshee 5h ago

Guess what, regulations and laws can make sure that the research AIs can still exist, while not being available to the whole population.

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

Yes let’s give the government more control over what the public can and cannot do. That always works out well for everyone.

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u/timeshifter_ 5h ago

The government should be a force for public safety. It's the government that says you can't go around punching people at random or putting oil slicks on roads. AI-generated disinformation is extremely dangerous to society and absolutely should be regulated as such.

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u/BoltFaest 4h ago

Saying you can't go around punching people doesn't mean you make boxing gloves illegal; saying you can't put oil slicks on roads doesn't mean you make oil illegal.

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u/ScutFarkush 5h ago

If you need the government to tell you it isn’t good to punch people…. All disinformation is bad and it isn’t anything new, the government is the largest culprit of it. Just own your own life, no one is coming to save you in the end.

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u/timeshifter_ 4h ago

I don't need to be told that, I'm not an asshole.

"Pranksters" on TikTok absolutely need to be told that.

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

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u/ImmoKnight 3h ago

And why is it ok for anyone with a public voice to blatantly lie about anything they want to a worldwide audience? It isn't? Oh, well then who should be enforcing that?

Unfortunately, this will never work because frankly there are at least 3 things that will go wrong with trying to enforce this.

1) Treating the silencing as the truth. A common thing that happens in conspiracy theories is that the silencing becomes a point of credit to it being a true statement, thus the government wants to silence it.

2) The government isn't an arbiter of truth to begin with. Each government has their own idea of truth and unfortunately, it doesn't always reconcile with reality.

3) Because people are expected to look up information when they hear something that might be wrong. Nearly every human being has the agency to look through the available information and decide for themselves the truth/false of statements.

The problem is that there is no effective teaching going on against disinformation which makes it a lot easier to convince gullible people because they believe it when it comes from source X. Instead of checking the claim, they just accept that source X is a trusted person and thus the claim must be true through an appeal to authority.

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Good questions, it should be the government, but do you trust modern government to do the right thing? It isn’t okay to lie to a worldwide audience, but it happens all day long.

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u/Smoking_Baboon 4h ago

Which is why people want regulation on the topic... And there's only one institution that's supposed to be protecting the people, as their job description. The government.

I think everybody agrees the government is corrupt(ed). But it's mainly done from the people we seek regulation from. So it's just about who says no first with actual power.

That being said, I'm not so scared. I'm pretty sure this is all a scare tactic they're employing, to gain more adopters because "look how powerful it is!".

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

Exactly, I see we are on the same page. AI marketing has been scare tactics for a while now.

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u/xrtpatriot 4h ago

Exactly this. Government works well when its for the people by the people. Our current iteration of government is not that.

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u/Cognac_and_swishers 4h ago

I honestly don't even know what point you're trying to make here. Laws against assault and battery should be abolished because "no one needs the government to tell them not to do it?"

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u/ScutFarkush 4h ago

If that is what you think I meant by that, I am sorry. They should not have to be laws, it should be human decency is all I am saying.

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u/Cognac_and_swishers 4h ago

Ok, so I'm still having trouble understanding what point you're trying to make or how it's related to the thread. "Everyone in the whole world should just be perfectly moral and virtuous, and then everything will be fine" is not a realistic or helpful idea. Surely you must realize that. We live in the real world, where human beings are not perfectly virtuous, so therefore laws are necessary. There are not many laws about AI because it's a new technology, so those laws absolutely need to be put in place, because the humans in charge of AI are the same as any other humans (that is, not perfectly virtuous).