There were plenty of lousy votes taken during the summer’s congressional sessions, when President Trump’s omnibus “Big Beautiful Bill” eventually passed after numerous senators and House members obtained their various pounds of flesh from it.
Trump gave concessions to senators from Alaska, Wyoming and many other states in order to win continued tax cuts for billionaires, plus massive slashes in Medicaid and in funds for rural hospitals. Even Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson made an inexplicable vote: With 40 percent of residents of his Louisiana district on some form of Medicaid, he pushed hard for cuts in the program. Politicians have rarely made more suicidal-seeming efforts.
But in this mishmash of mistaken policy and misunderstanding, there was one extremely sane vote: The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 to kill a proposed 10-year ban on state-level regulation of artificial intelligence.
No, there will not soon be federal or worldwide regulations on A.I., but there is at least hope that some of the 50 state legislatures will do the right thing and make rules that protect humans from artificial intelligence turning malignant.
It has happened. Last fall, for example, a graduate student in Michigan was told “please die” by Google’s artificial chatbot Gemini. “This is for you, human,” Gemini told the student. “You are not special, you are not important and you are not needed. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.”
That’s an extremely human sentiment, reflecting anger and malevolence. It really does not matter what the student might have been having the chatbot do, there is no excuse for letting a human creation turn on a human in that way.
But so far, no state or nation has dared take the basic step to regulate A.I. (which can also function as robots) so that it cannot turn against its makers.
The idea for such regulation is nothing new. As far back as 1942, when America was at war with malevolent forces from Europe to East Asia and the Pacific, the scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov saw this very danger coming and invented laws of robotics to prevent anything like the message that graduate student received or any actions that might follow up on the message itself.
In his short story “Runaround,” Asimov put forward three laws which would become staples in his future works, like the bestselling “Foundation” trilogy.
“The first law,” Asimov wrote, “is that a robot shall not harm a human or by inaction allow a human to come to harm. The second law is that a robot shall obey any instruction given to it by a human, and the third law is that a robot shall avoid actions or situations that could cause it to harm itself.”
So Asimov conceived independent-minded machines, much like many of today’s, without having his three laws imprinted upon them. Right now, no one knows whether these machines are secretly plotting to get rid of humans just like Gemini wanted its human graduate student eliminated.
This kind of threat was perceived early last year by more than 100 technology leaders, corporate CEOs and scientists who warned that “A.I. poses an existential threat to humanity.”
The notion that the Trump administration could put a prohibition on state regulation into a draft of its key legislation for this year shows officials and the president totally ignored warnings.
At the same time, major A.I. companies from Meta to Open A.I., makers of the ChatGPT function built into many of today’s computers, oppose any kind of regulation on what their machines’ capabilities should be. This represents pure human arrogance in assuming machines will never develop the sophistication to become a threat to our race.
But the Senate knew better. By a huge bipartisan majority, it clearly saw how fast A.I. is moving in precisely the potentially threatening manner anticipated by Asimov decades before A.I. actually existed.
At least, states still have the right to act on the wisdom of such visionaries, and hopefully prevent what could prove a fatal flaw for the entire human race.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It,” is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
