AI regulation fails – it develops too quickly
Wheeler ‘23 [Tom; June 15; Visiting fellow in Governance Studies at Brookings. Nusinessman, author, and was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 2013 to 2017. For over four decades, has been involved with new telecommunications networks and services; Brookings, “The three challenges of AI regulation,” https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-three-challenges-of-ai-regulation/]//av
To keep the corporate AI race from becoming reckless requires the establishment and development of rules and the enforcement of legal guardrails. Dealing with the velocity of AI-driven change, however, can outstrip the federal government’s existing expertise and authority. The regulatory statutes and structures available to the government today were built on industrial era assumptions that have already been outpaced by the first decades of the digital platform era. Existing rules are insufficiently agile to deal with the velocity of AI development.
Former Google Executive Chairman and current AI evangelist Eric Schmidt has warned, “There’s no one in government who can get it [AI oversight] right.” While Mr. Schmidt recognizes the need for behavioral expectations, his solution is, “I would much rather have the current companies define reasonable boundaries.” Such a self-regulatory approach is the same kind of “leave us alone” solution that has been championed by digital platform companies for the last 20 years. The results of this strategy speak for themselves in well-known current online harms, such as the unprecedented invasion of personal privacy, market concentration, user manipulation, and the dissemination of hate, lies, and misinformation. AI demands something better than corporate self-regulation when we know the chase for profits is likely to outstrip the implementation of meaningful guardrails.
Allowing the companies to become pseudo-governments and make their own rules to govern AI would be to repeat the mistake made when they were allowed to make their own rules for online platforms. As Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) has explained, “Congress failed to meet the moment on social media. Now we have the obligation to do it on AI before the threats and the risks become real.”