Though there was no substantial mention of it during the presidential campaign, history’s strange humor has aligned perhaps the most challenging of Science questions with our most technologically phobic and disorganized incoming president.
Just as Artificial Intelligence issues are moving to an economic, military and international climax, we have elected Donald Trump, who seems to disdain science, research, rigor and expert knowledge with a passion — unless it can be sold, literally or figuratively, as an approach that serves him personally.
Indeed, the utter pervasiveness of AI emerging in everything from weather prediction to cyber futures, learning machines to medical advances, and the parallel advances in military weaponry and the possibilities for crime are arriving as Trump picks Cabinet members who vocally detest “deep state” expertise that we might expect would be involved in shaping AI policies and regulations.
Who knows? With health appointees who hate vaccine research while wishfully promising disease-free access to healthier foods, and defense and intelligence appointees who dismiss whatever institutional knowledge we have in those fields, maybe we should just go all in for machine solutions to how to govern.
With Elon Musk, a self-interested, billionaire developer with business plans aplenty for his own branded AI whispering in Trump’s ear, perhaps it is silly to think that there will be anything but a market-rapacious approach to regulation, even as artificial intelligence is making us leery of believing what we hear and see as being true. Hmm, isn’t the presidential circle supposed to swear off personal conflicts of interest?
AI as International Competition
In the four years since Trump last was president, AI in its various forms has moved from science fiction realms to a cornerstone for understanding world economic and technological leadership, a number of business reports from left, right and mainstream sources agree.
The economic tussle between the United States and China may well make AI the central issue in figuring out just how much regulation is right and how much pressure there will be on national controls for the pace of change. It’s not a matter of tariffs and taxing power, it’s a matter of balancing the kind of smarts it takes for developers and the kind of protections it requires for citizens.
What are the chances that Trump and China’s Xi Jinping will figure out how to share technical and ethical standards for artificial intelligence development, or that America and Europe or Israel, Russia, India or Iran and North Korea will agree on acceptable limits on the most destructive aspects of AI? We can’t even agree on what nuclear weapons to keep behind protective cages.
No, we can expect loud, nationalized barking for leadership instead, with most concern for profit and least for individual rights. In case you haven’t thought about it, AI is complicated. The Trump approach generally eschews the complex.
America and Regulation
Subtle and complex are two qualities no one associates with Trump — or his Cabinet selections. Rather, those picks are hailed or hated for the same reason, that their reason for selection is based on personal political loyalty to Trump himself and to the proposition that we should be burning down most of what we have thought of as government to start over.
The advances in AI are so broad already as to promise better medicine than doctors now can predict, more accurate weather forecasts, better learning techniques for willing students than many teachers can provide and so on in field after field. From all I read about AI, the next four years will amplify those advances by geometric proportions.
It is not beyond reason that the same Elon Musk who has endowed himself with the power to remake government will be the one to chuck the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration for an AI box (likely from Musk’s own company) to issue weather warnings. And at our health agencies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vax crowd will announce that artificial intelligence should replace large swaths of data collection that we rely on the Centers for Disease Control to do.
Here’s a vision: Amid self-imposed pressures to make “growth” and profit dominant over concern for environment, consumer cost, individual rights, the Trump administration will let deregulation be the AI watchword. Nearly every job we have will be remade with the lure of automation and never-tiring robot workers. Just what do you think the effect will be on blue- and white-collar jobs and on the average, apparently already angered American family?
Machines with advanced self-learning intelligence — a learning curve that the experts at the Big Tech firms say is running ahead of their understanding — could prove both brilliant and brutal in our real world. Are we going to let machines decide whom to deport as unwarranted and undocumented migrants? Are we going to let police who already cannot use face-identification software properly rely on predictive qualities for who might commit crimes? Shall we let machines decide on whether we want a national park or oil drilling?
We’ve tried leaving social media to private companies and seem unhappy at the algorithmic messiness that has been created in a totally deregulated world. We can’t even talk with one another as a result, suicides are spiraling, parents are upset, and our kids have lost the attention span needed to read a book.
We have handed a set of AI tools to a president who hates anything more complicated than a campaign slogan. What could go wrong?
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