PUBLIC CITIZEN the risk of extinction from artificial intelligence

I post these PUBLIC CITIZEN announcements . Solely as a source for information we may not otherwise get a chance to hear . While I most often agree with many of their causes . I post these as more informational than political .

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

That’s the full text of a succinct yet potent statement released today that has so far been signed by over 350 executives, researchers, and engineers who work on artificial intelligence — including the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the infamous ChatGPT.

Last week, Microsoft called for the U.S. government to regulate what it and other Big Tech companies are doing with artificial intelligence. Other major A.I. companies have also requested government intervention.

A few thoughts:

• These companies are not wrong. Public Citizen has been pressuring the federal government to move urgently and aggressively on regulating artificial intelligence.
  

• But it is, to put it mildly, uncommon for a multinational corporation like Microsoft — one of the richest and most ubiquitous on the planet — to *ask* to be meaningfully regulated.
  

• In fact, as you know, businesses like Microsoft spend a lot of money — bankrolling politicians, funding lobbyists, generating propaganda, and hiring armies of lawyers — blatantly trying to weaken regulations (or prevent them from being enacted in the first place) and fighting them in court.
  

• If A.I. makes even the tech titans rushing it into existence nervous enough to beg for government oversight, maybe they should just stop working on it.
  

Join Public Citizen in a message for Congress:

Even companies developing artificial intelligence are asking the federal government to step in before it’s too late. Congress must move — urgently and aggressively — to understand the risks of A.I. and to enact comprehensive, powerful regulations that will protect the American people from those risks.

Click now to add your name.

Thanks for taking action.

For progress,

- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen