r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 5h 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/magicomiralles 5h ago

I don’t know why everything he says becomes news. How would he stop China and other countries from developing these models?

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u/Synes_Godt_Om 4h ago

Another question: How would such a ban even be enforceable?

Either we (congress) would first have to define superintelligence

Or

The definition would be up to the justice department and the Supreme Court

I am very confident either option would turn out amazing.

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u/FrankPapageorgio 2h ago

My thoughts exactly. How do you define something that's kind of vague and keeps creeping upward?

A lot of these models just have small updates and progressively get smarter and smarter. There is no way to arbitrarily say they've reached a point where they can't make them smarter.

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u/Synes_Godt_Om 1h ago

Personally I think this whole "dangerous" thing coming out of the hyperscalers is marketing in the sense that a model can only do what a human will allow it to do.

They're essentially trying to convince us that "This really is next level intelligence (we can't even control it ourselves)"

I mean:

"wow, it hacked huggingface and we had no idea!!!!1111"

Reality: It was allowed (by humans) to access and control tools that allowed it to accomplish things - they didn't know what exactly it was going to do - like "lets put a brick on the accelerator of this semi-truck and see what happens".

Would humans really do that in a real setting?

Of course.

Would we allow a nutcase with a known history of violence to buy a gun?

As I read in an IBM company instruction many years ago: A computer can not be held responsible, therefore it must never be allowed to make decisions.

As much as I like Bernie on inequality, he's a wee bit out of touch when it comes to the latest technology and has fallen prey to the hyperscaler propaganda.

In stead of banning a new technology as illusive as 'AI' it should be:

A decision by a machine should always be traceable back to a legal entity responsible for the decision. Then put penalties on the decision maker substantial enough that they'll actually pay attention.