Major Governments Starting to Take AI Seriously

… but there’s still a long way to go

My colleagues at SingularityNET and I applaud the steps forward President Biden has described in his recent comments on AI. It’s amazing to see the topics many of us have been working on for decades finally hitting the mainstream in this way.

However, we also feel that the steps discussed in these comments are not nearly enough, and we hope that they are merely the first steps to be taken in the execution of a broader and more proactive federal AI plan.

The reported voluntary commitments on the part of Big Tech companies developing advanced AI technologies are highly worthwhile, and the commitment to digital watermarking (to identify AI-generated materials) is a particularly laudable step (indeed, it has been obvious for a while that this should be done, and it’s great that the Biden Administration has been able to nudge industry leaders to take the final steps to make it happen).

In general, however, the stated commitments are sufficiently vague, and the consequences for departure from stated commitment sufficiently nonexistent that it’s not entirely clear how these voluntary commitments differ from feel-good PR statements (in fact, as a mildly amusing aside, it seems they roughly resemble some of the feel-good PR that LLMs are especially good at generating).

We also feel that, while the President’s comments do acknowledge the major transformations AI is in the midst of affecting our society and economy, they do not seem to come to grips with the potential magnitude and speed of these changes. We are talking about technology that has the potential to eliminate a majority of human jobs within a fairly modest time frame (potentially less than a decade), and exceed human levels of general intelligence. In our view, this merits a more emphatic response from the federal government than voluntary industry agreements and the creation of research institutes.

The work Big Tech companies are doing is, in many cases, broadly valuable R&D, yet this is still being done within the scope of relatively limited business models, focusing on AI architectures designed to fit the needs of these business models and primarily for the economic benefit of the small elite who own significant shares of these companies. We feel that if the coming transformations we are bringing on ourselves via our development of advanced AI are going to lead to broadly beneficial outcomes, we will need to see a few things done differently than the current status quo, e.g.

1) Development and deployment of AI architectures with more focus on self-understanding and self-reflection, moral agency, empathy and compassion.

2) Democratization and decentralization of ownership and control of AI systems, significantly beyond “control by Big Tech companies that have agreed to ‘be good’ in a loose and informal way (but still have a primary mandate of maximizing shareholder value).”

3) Emphasis of practical AI deployment on strongly beneficial areas such as education, healthcare, human consciousness expansion, scientific research and creative arts, rather than the historically dominant foci of advertising, espionage, military and high finance.

4) Specific direction of substantial resources toward using AI and allied advanced technologies to help the developing world cope with the coming AI-powered transitions (as without this sort of effort, it seems the effect of the coming AGI revolution on the developing world is likely to be especially dire, at least for a transitional period before AGI becomes sufficiently powerful to upend the current pattern of dramatic global wealth inequality).

These four steps are sizable yet also feasible; they are things that are already being worked on by a variety of individuals and entities in the AI community outside the Big Tech sphere, including the open-source software and blockchain communities, among others (although it should be noted that current US government regulatory confusion toward blockchain is not doing any favors to those of us working toward decentralized AI frameworks and systems!). The SingularityNET ecosystem is doing its best to push forward in all these important directions.

However, the amount of resources going into such initiatives, as compared to the use of AI to work toward Big Tech shareholder value, is relatively minuscule, and this is certainly an area where well targeted government strategic initiatives could help.

We hope that the Biden Administration will keep these factors in mind when charting its course forward beyond the laudable but limited and simple early-stage steps reported in the President’s recent remarks. We at SingularityNET, along with others in the space, are more than eager to collaborate on these matters as the next steps in the AGI revolution unfold.

About SingularityNET

SingularityNET is a decentralized Platform and Marketplace for Artificial Intelligence (AI) services. Our mission is the creation of a decentralized, democratic, inclusive, and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), democratizing access to AI and AGI technologies through:

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