'Don't Wait, Regulate': Worldwide Demand Grows for Urgent AI Guardrails

Calls to regulate the development of artificial intelligence are growing louder days after multiple industry insiders warned that the technology could wipe out humanity within years.

In an op-ed published by The New York Times on Friday, journalist Stephen Witt said that he's detected a "vibe shift" among AI researchers who are worried that the technology is becoming too powerful for them to understand, let alone control.

"Swarms of AIs are breaking out of their containers, colluding in secret, covering their tracks, cheating on tests, and even mounting assaults on other computers," Witt wrote. "AI has gone rogue."

Witt said these incidents have convinced him, and many others inside the industry, that there needs to be a global pause on AI research and development.

The journalist noted there has been widespread support among industry insiders for an open letter titled "Pacing the Frontier," which calls on the US government to take the lead in building an international regulatory body that would set guardrails to deliberately slow down AI development.

Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division, told Witt that he'd like to create "an international, open monitoring system" that would act like an air traffic control system for AI development.

Under Kokotajlo's plan, all AI researchers would be required by law to post information on training runs into a public database that can be monitored in real time.

"If we had this sort of total research transparency," Kokotajlo told Witt, "then there would be this whole ecosystem of academics, third-party auditors, nonprofits, and rival corporations who would all be able to see what was going on inside the giant data centers of these big companies. Insofar as something scary or problematic was happening, anyone could sort of point it out and start a conversation about it online."

The US is not the only country where lawmakers are proposing new regulations for AI.

As reported by Time on Tuesday, Alex Sobel, a member of Parliament from the UK's Labour Party, unveiled a bill this week that would ban artificial superintelligence, defined by the legislation as "a system that could disempower state authorities."

Sobel's bill is similar to legislation proposed in the US earlier this month by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), which would ban artificial superintelligence to "stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control."

In Warsaw on Tuesday, activists deployed several robots outside Poland's Digital Affairs Ministry to demand the country do more to regulate AI.

According to Notes from Poland, the robots were programmed to chant slogans such as "We want regulations, we want rules, we want law" and "Don't wait, regulate, protect jobs."

Democratism, the group that organized the robot protest, argued that the AI industry has the potential to completely upend human society, and demanded to know "who is responsible for preparing people for these changes, how workers should be protected during the transition, and how reskilling should work."

Even though demand to regulate AI is surging, there is little indication so far that governments are preparing to work collectively to place guardrails on the industry.

Greg Jensen, chief investment officer of hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, told Bloomberg on Friday that he doesn't believe governments will act until after a tragedy happens.

“Until the AI starts killing people, unfortunately, history would suggest we’re not going to do anything, but we are going to face that," said Jensen, who likened the current risk environment with AI to the risks posed by Covid-19 in February 2020. "That’s going to happen, and it’d be much better if we started dealing with it before then."