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Have You Even Heard of RASCOM? A Command for America's Robot Army
Lawmakers are pushing for a new combatant command they say will speed up the military’s uptake of robotic and autonomous systems. Experts warn they are ignoring serious flaws with this approach.
Jul 19, 2026
Even as the Pentagon mulls culling its combatant commands to reduce its bureaucratic bloat, lawmakers are itching to prop up another one — based on robots and AI.
Combatant commands like CENTCOM (Central Command) and AFRICOM (Africa Command) — sprawling military headquarters which oversee operations and activities across their assigned region or function — are notorious for their high operational costs and continued pushes for more responsibilities, including entanglements abroad.
The Department of Defense has weighed paring the commands back in response, floating restructuring plans last December that would reduce their number from 11 to 8. But lawmakers are going in the opposite direction, pushing for a new combatant command they say will speed up the military’s uptake of robotic and autonomous systems.
As experts tell RS, the new command is poised to create more redundancy, waste, and inefficiency — and the mission creep that comes with it — while stifling efforts to deploy such technologies in practice.
Embracing the future of warfare?
Tucked into the Senate Armed Services Committee’s (SASC) version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2027, a provision called section 917 would allow for the creation of a Robotic and Autonomous Systems Command (RASCOM).
By centralizing oversight over autonomous systems, lawmakers hope RASCOM will help the military adopt them as quickly as possible. In particular, they aim to overcome difficulties that have plagued previous procurement efforts.
In a press release, SASC chairman Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) hailed the prospective combatant command as a means to help the military “embrace 21st century warfare.”
RASCOM “would standardize the way the entire armed services use unmanned systems in combat,” Wicker wrote, The armed service branches would be able to set up offices within RASCOM, “ensuring that [they all] adopt the latest systems.”
Runaway bureaucratic bloat
But another combatant command would be at odds with the Pentagon's stated goal of reducing its sprawling bureaucratic overhead.
DoD Secretary Pete Hegseth “has righteously complained about bloat in the GOFO [General and Flag Officers] corps, saying he wants to cut the number of [four-star generals] by 20%," Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, told RS. "Another place to park a four-star and his buddies flies in the face of that.”
A new combatant command would also take up work the Pentagon is already doing through its deployment of uncrewed systems across its operation. And, as Jennifer Kavanagh, Defense Priorities’ director of military analysis, tells RS, the administrative structure needed for a new combatant command will “duplicate functions provided elsewhere, including at the leadership level.”
What’s more, combatant commands rarely remain limited to their original missions. Instead, they often push for greater budgets, more responsibilities, and more sway over the direction of U.S. military policy.
“If RASCOM is created, it will face the same institutional incentives to expand its mission,” Gary Sampson, a national security strategist and retired U.S. Marine Corps intelligence and international affairs officer, told RS.
“Just like the Navy pushes for Naval spending and CENTCOM pushes for wars in the Middle East, RASCOM would act as a sales team for robotics and autonomous systems,” Logan predicted, referencing CENTCOM officials’ persistent support for continued U.S. military engagement in the Middle East. “That is the job of companies who manufacture autonomous systems, not the U.S. government.”
Standing up and maintaining another command would also be costly. “This is the last thing the Pentagon needs given its already massive budget,” Kavanagh said.
And, once established, RASCOM may prove difficult to get rid of. As Dan Grazier, who directs the Stimson Center’s National Security reform program, tells RS, “there would be entrenched interests that... have a stake in seeing it continue.”
“Even if the [command’s] headquarters is stood down later, many functions, personnel, and institutional interests tend to persist and migrate elsewhere,” Sampson said.
Throwing a wrench at military preparedness
Beyond concerns over bureaucratic bloat and mission creep, experts observe that RASCOM’s proposed organizational structure could create other operational problems.
For example, most existing combatant commands are organized around geographic missions, or by function. In contrast, RASCOM would be structured around a class of tools.
Brandon Carr, a senior studies associate at the Quincy Institute, tells RS this “logic is well-intentioned” but “likely to be counterproductive.”
“So many future robotic and autonomous systems will become part of an individual service member’s personal equipment,” Carr said. The “technology does not lend itself to a unified command with centralized control.”
To best promote innovation, he said, “robotic and autonomous systems should be integrated and deployed down to the lowest levels of each service.”
Others contend RASCOM’s centralized approach could hinder autonomous systems' use on the battlefield.
David Deptula, the dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, wrote last month that a combatant command “would risk centralizing control in a way that makes [autonomous] capabilities less responsive to the commanders who need them most.”
That could create a “seam in command and control” that adversaries would exploit in combat, Deptula wrote. (The Mitchell Institute is financially supported by weapons contractors.)
More broadly, Grazier cautioned against an over-reliance on autonomous systems, warning that adversaries will inevitably look for and leverage their weaknesses.
“We’re spending a crazy amount of money building this robot army. When it’s disrupted [by enemy combatants], our skills to operate without it will have atrophied,” Grazier warned. “We’re actually building in the means of our own defeat.”
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AI, Democratic Party Failures, and a 32-Hour Work Week
Leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks have been killing tens of millions of jobs, not AI. And they will continue to do so until we have a political movement with the guts to take on high finance and protect the needs and interests of the rest of us.
Aug 21, 2025
Isn’t it wiping out our jobs, stealing our creativity, blurring fact and fiction with deep fakes, and pushing us into a dystopian future that will suck the humanity out of us all? Are we doomed?
For historian Yuval Harari and would-be politician Andrew Yang, AI will create self-driving trucks that will decimate the working-class. Peter Truchin, the mathematical historian, seriously imagines a future in which AI robots are used to colonize asteroids with new weapons that will allow a few powerful men, or maybe just one, to rule the universe.
Getta grip!
While inflammatory prognosticators predict that hundreds of millions of jobs will be gobbled up by AI, only 10,000 jobs were cut due to AI in the first seven months of 2025. That sure-to-be-slaughtered trucking industry is expected to experience an 11 percent total increase, not decrease, in truck drivers through 2030. It’s not at all clear that more jobs will be destroyed than created as AI spreads. Predictions of the unemployed roaming the streets due to automation haven’t yet occurred even during rapid periods of technological change. Why should this time be different?
Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible that a wide range of jobs will be dramatically impacted by AI. This wouldn’t be the first time. World War II also ushered in an amazing array of new technologies and production techniques to compensate for and cope with the vast needs of a war economy that was missing 17 million workers in the armed forces.
We seem in total awe of AI, falling on our knees before its vast power, while experiencing no power of our own to change the course of events.
But then, as opposed to now, Wall Street didn’t run the country, and we had a powerful labor movement that understood that vast productivity increases could lead to increased wages and shorter workweeks, not just job destruction.
Today, things are more than a little different. We seem in total awe of AI, falling on our knees before its vast power, while experiencing no power of our own to change the course of events. As a result, we aren’t even discussing how AI could and should be used to create a four-day work week without reduced pay.
Imagine for a moment that AI does have the potential to eliminate one-fifth of all jobs without new jobs filling the breach. Going to a four-day work week would make certain that unemployment would remain low, while tens of millions gain more time away from work without loss of pay. Mind-numbing work could be replaced. Work and home life could be enriched.
That kind of dream was alive and well when labor unions represented more than one out of every three private sector workers, instead of about one in 20 today. During and after WWII, labor unions were a force to be reckoned with. Government and corporate leaders understood that the fruits of productivity needed to be shared with working people or there would be big trouble in the form of mass strikes.
We no longer think these thoughts. We no longer have these discussions. We no longer imagine having enough power to make such substantive changes to our collective work lives.
In October 1955, a congressional committee held hearings on “Automation and Technological Change,” to deal with the unease the country felt about technological change. The report said what was obvious then but is totally absent from today’s AI hysteria.
“The prevailing workweek in manufacturing today, as is well known, is about 40 hours per week compared to about 45 in the mid-1920s and about 60 at the turn of the century. The hope is frequently expressed that the fruits of automation may permit us to reduce this still further to 30, 32, or 35 hours per week in the not-so-distant future.”
Not so distant future? That was written 70 years ago.
We no longer think these thoughts. We no longer have these discussions. We no longer imagine having enough power to make such substantive changes to our collective work lives. We expect the fruits of productivity to go entirely to the corporations and Wall Street – their reward for their great insights and ingenuity. (With the exception of Professor Juliet Schor, who is conducting research on the value of a four-day work week and helping corporations try it.)
And why? Because we have lost our collective will to power as expressed by labor unions. And our political representatives have allowed Wall Street to run wild all over us.
At this very moment, Wall Street and large corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are killing tens of thousands of jobs to finance stock buybacks, the tool of choice to enrich the largest shareholders and richest executives. (For the data to prove that point see Chapter 11 of Wall Street’s War on Workers.)
Leveraged buyouts and stock buybacks have been killing tens of millions of jobs, not AI. And they will continue to do so until we have a political movement with the guts to take on high finance and protect the needs and interests of the rest of us.
As I will show in more detail in upcoming columns, the Democratic Party is not it. Working people want something new….and soon.
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EU Deal on AI Act Is 'Missed Opportunity' to Ban Mass Surveillance, Say Privacy Groups
"Whilst the Parliament fought hard to limit the damage, the overall package on biometric surveillance and profiling is at best lukewarm," said one advocate.
Dec 09, 2023
Privacy advocates on Saturday said the AI Act, a sweeping proposed law to regulate artificial intelligence in the European Union whose language was finalized Friday, appeared likely to fail at protecting the public from one of AI's greatest threats: live facial recognition.
Representatives of the European Commission spent 37 hours this week negotiating provisions in the AI Act with the European Council and European Parliament, running up against Council representatives from France, Germany, and Italy who sought to water down the bill in the late stages of talks.
Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for internal market and a key negotiator of the deal, said the final product would establish the E.U. as "a pioneer, understanding the importance of its role as global standard setter."
But Amnesty Tech, the branch of global human rights group Amnesty International that focuses on technology and surveillance, was among the groups that raised concerns about the bloc's failure to include "an unconditional ban on live facial recognition," which was in an earlier draft, in the legislation.
The three institutions, said Mher Hakobyan, Amnesty Tech's advocacy adviser on AI, "in effect greenlighted dystopian digital surveillance in the 27 EU Member States, setting a devastating precedent globally concerning AI regulation."
"While proponents argue that the draft allows only limited use of facial recognition and subject to safeguards, Amnesty's research in New York City, Occupied Palestinian Territories, Hyderabad, and elsewhere demonstrates that no safeguards can prevent the human rights harms that facial recognition inflicts, which is why an outright ban is needed," said Hakobyan. "Not ensuring a full ban on facial recognition is therefore a hugely missed opportunity to stop and prevent colossal damage to human rights, civic space, and rule of law that are already under threat throughout the E.U."
The bill is focused on protecting Europeans against other significant risks of AI, including the automation of jobs, the spread of misinformation, and national security threats.
Tech companies would be required to complete rigorous testing on AI software before operating in the EU, particularly for applications like self-driving vehicles.
Tools that could pose risks to hiring practices would also need to be subjected to risk assessments, and human oversight would be required in deploying the software,
AI systems including chatbots would be subjected to new transparency rules to avoid the creation of manipulated images and videos—known as deepfakes—without the public knowing that the images were generated by AI.
The indiscriminate scraping of internet or security footage images to create facial recognition databases would also be outright banned.
But the proposed AI Act, which could be passed before the end of the European Parliament session ends in May, includes exemptions to facial recognition provisions, allowing law enforcement agencies to use live facial recognition to search for human trafficking victims, prevent terrorist attacks, and arrest suspects of certain violent crimes.
Ella Jakubowska, a senior policy adviser at European Digital Rights, told The Washington Post that "some human rights safeguards have been won" in the AI Act.
"It's hard to be excited about a law which has, for the first time in the E.U., taken steps to legalize live public facial recognition across the bloc," Jakubowska told Reuters. "Whilst the Parliament fought hard to limit the damage, the overall package on biometric surveillance and profiling is at best lukewarm."
Hakobyan also noted that the bill did not include a ban on "the export of harmful AI technologies, including for social scoring, which would be illegal in the E.U."
"Allowing European companies to profit off from technologies that the law recognizes impermissibly harm human rights in their home states establishes a dangerous double standard," said Hakobyan.
After passage, many AI Act provisions would not take effect for 12 to 24 months.
Andreas Liebl, managing director of the German company AppliedAI Initiative, acknowledged that the law would likely have an impact on tech companies' ability to operate in the European Union.
"There will be a couple of innovations that are just not possible or economically feasible anymore," Liebl told the Post.
But Kris Shrishak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, told The New York Times that the E.U. will have to prove its "regulatory prowess" after the law is passed.
"Without strong enforcement," said Shrishak, "this deal will have no meaning."
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US Among 18 Countries to Reach Deal on Keeping AI 'Secure by Design'
The agreement "is a step in the right direction for security," said one observer, "but that's not the only area where AI can cause harm."
Nov 27, 2023
Like an executive order introduced by U.S. President Joe Biden last month, a global agreement on artificial intelligence released Sunday was seen by experts as a positive step forward—but one that would require more action from policymakers to ensure AI isn't harmful to workers, democratic systems, and the privacy of people around the world.
The 20-page agreement, first reported Monday, was reached by 18 countries including the U.S., U.K., Germany, Israel, and Nigeria, and was billed as a deal that would push companies to keep AI systems "secure by design."
The agreement is nonbinding and deals with four main areas: secure design, development, deployment, and operation and maintenance.
Policymakers including the director of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jen Easterly, forged the agreement with a heavy focus on keeping AI technology safe from hackers and security breaches.
The document includes recommendations such as implementing standard cybersecurity best practices, monitoring the security of an AI supply chain across the system's life cycle, and releasing models "only after subjecting them to appropriate and effective security evaluation."
"This is the first time that we have seen an affirmation that these capabilities should not just be about cool features and how quickly we can get them to market or how we can compete to drive down costs," Easterly told Reuters. The document, she said, represents an "agreement that the most important thing that needs to be done at the design phase is security."
Norm Eisen, senior fellow at the think tank Brookings Institution, said the deal "is a step in the right direction for security" in a field that U.K. experts recently warned is vulnerable to hackers who could launch "prompt injection" attacks, causing an AI model to behave in a way that the designer didn't intend or reveal private information.
"But that's not the only area where AI can cause harm," Eisen said on social media.
Eisen pointed to a recent Brrokings analysis about how AI could "weaken" democracy in the U.S. and other countries, worsening the "flood of misinformation" with deepfakes and other AI-generated images.
"Advocacy groups or individuals looking to misrepresent public opinion may find an ally in AI," wrote Eisen, along with Nicol Turner Lee, Colby Galliher, and Jonathan Katz last week. "AI-fueled programs, like ChatGPT, can fabricate letters to elected officials, public comments, and other written endorsements of specific bills or positions that are often difficult to distinguish from those written by actual constituents... Much worse, voice and image replicas harnessed from generative AI tools can also mimic candidates and elected officials. These tactics could give rise to voter confusion and degrade confidence in the electoral process if voters become aware of such scams."
At AppleInsider, tech writer Malcolm Owen denounced Sunday's agreement as "toothless and weak," considering it does not require policymakers or companies to adhere to the guidelines.
Owen noted that tech firms including Google, Amazon, and Palantir consulted with global government agencies in developing the guidelines.
"These are all guidelines, not rules that must be obeyed," wrote Owen. "There are no penalties for not following what is outlined, and no introduction of laws. The document is just a wish list of things that governments want AI makers to really think about... And, it's not clear when or if legislation will arrive mandating what's in the document."
European Union member countries passed a draft of what the European Parliament called "the world's first comprehensive AI law" earlier this year with the AI Act. The law would require AI systems makers to publish summaries of the training material they use and prove that they will not generate illegal content. It would also bar companies from scraping biometric data from social media, which a U.S. AI company was found to be doing last year.
"AI tools are evolving rapidly," said Eisen on Monday, "and policymakers need to keep up."
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Tech Experts Warn Humanity Must Act Now to Avoid 'Societal-Scale' Damage by AI
"It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems," said one computer science professor. "These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless."
Oct 24, 2023
Amid preparations for a global artificial intelligence safety summit in the United Kingdom, two dozen AI experts on Tuesday released a short paper and policy supplement urging humanity to "address ongoing harms and anticipate emerging risks" associated with the rapidly developing technology.
The experts—including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Andrew Yao—wrote that "AI may be the technology that shapes this century. While AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, progress in safety and governance is lagging behind. To steer AI toward positive outcomes and away from catastrophe, we need to reorient. There is a responsible path, if we have the wisdom to take it."
Already, "high deep learning systems can write software, generate photorealistic scenes on demand, advise on intellectual topics, and combine language and image processing to steer robots," they noted, stressing how much advancement has come in just the past few years. "There is no fundamental reason why AI progress would slow or halt at the human level."
"Once autonomous AI systems pursue undesirable goals, embedded by malicious actors or by accident, we may be unable to keep them in check."
Given that "AI systems could rapidly come to outperform humans in an increasing number of tasks," the experts warned, "if such systems are not carefully designed and deployed, they pose a range of societal-scale risks."
"They threaten to amplify social injustice, erode social stability, and weaken our shared understanding of reality that is foundational to society," the experts wrote. "They could also enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Especially in the hands of a few powerful actors, AI could cement or exacerbate global inequities, or facilitate automated warfare, customized mass manipulation, and pervasive surveillance."
"Many of these risks could soon be amplified, and new risks created, as companies are developing autonomous AI: systems that can plan, act in the world, and pursue goals," they highlighted. "Once autonomous AI systems pursue undesirable goals, embedded by malicious actors or by accident, we may be unable to keep them in check."
"AI assistants are already co-writing a large share of computer code worldwide; future AI systems could insert and then exploit security vulnerabilities to control the computer systems behind our communication, media, banking, supply chains, militaries, and governments," they explained. "In open conflict, AI systems could threaten with or use autonomous or biological weapons. AI having access to such technology would merely continue existing trends to automate military activity, biological research, and AI development itself. If AI systems pursued such strategies with sufficient skill, it would be difficult for humans to intervene."
The experts asserted that until sufficient regulations exist, major companies should "lay out if-then commitments: specific safety measures they will take if specific red-line capabilities are found in their AI systems." They are also calling on tech giants and public funders to put at least a third of their artificial intelligence research and development budgets toward "ensuring safety and ethical use, comparable to their funding for AI capabilities."
Meanwhile, policymakers must get to work. According to the experts:
To keep up with rapid progress and avoid inflexible laws, national institutions need strong technical expertise and the authority to act swiftly. To address international race dynamics, they need the affordance to facilitate international agreements and partnerships. To protect low-risk use and academic research, they should avoid undue bureaucratic hurdles for small and predictable AI models. The most pressing scrutiny should be on AI systems at the frontier: a small number of most powerful AI systems—trained on billion-dollar supercomputers—which will have the most hazardous and unpredictable capabilities.
To enable effective regulation, governments urgently need comprehensive insight into AI development. Regulators should require model registration, whistleblower protections, incident reporting, and monitoring of model development and supercomputer usage. Regulators also need access to advanced AI systems before deployment to evaluate them for dangerous capabilities such as autonomous self-replication, breaking into computer systems, or making pandemic pathogens widely accessible.
The experts also advocated for holding frontier AI developers and owners legally accountable for harms "that can be reasonably foreseen and prevented." As for future systems that could evade human control, they wrote, "governments must be prepared to license their development, pause development in response to worrying capabilities, mandate access controls, and require information security measures robust to state-level hackers, until adequate protections are ready."
Stuart Russell, one of the experts behind the documents and a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The Guardian that "there are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies."
"It's time to get serious about advanced AI systems," Russell said. "These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless."
In the United States, President Joe Biden plans to soon unveil an AI executive order, and U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and John Kennedy (R-La.) on Tuesday introduced a generative artificial intelligence bill welcomed by advocates.
"Generative AI threatens to plunge us into a world of fraud, deceit, disinformation, and confusion on a never-before-seen scale," said Public Citizen's Richard Anthony. "The Schatz-Kennedy AI Labeling Act would steer us away from this dystopian future by ensuring we can distinguish between content from humans and content from machines."
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White House Deal for Voluntary AI Safeguards Called 'Great Step' But 'Not Enough'
Advocacy groups and experts are pressuring Congress and federal regulators to "put meaningful, enforceable guardrails in place."
Jul 21, 2023
Amid rising global fears about the dangers of artificial intelligence, campaigners and experts applauded U.S. President Joe Biden's administration on Friday for securing voluntary risk management commitments from seven leading AI companies while also emphasizing the need for much more from lawmakers and regulators.
"I'm very happy to see this modest, but necessary, step on the way to proper governance of AI. It is all voluntary at this stage, yet good to get these norms agreed. Hopefully it is a step on a much longer path," said Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at the U.K.'s University of Oxford and author of The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity.
Rob Reich, a faculty associate director at Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, tweeted that "this is a big step forward for AI governance," and it is "great to see" Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI "coordinating on baseline norms of responsible AI development."
"We need enforceable accountability measures and requirements to roll out AI responsibly and mitigate the risks and potential harms to individuals, including bias and discrimination."
Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), called the announcement "a welcome step toward promoting trustworthy and secure AI systems."
"Red team testing, information sharing, and transparency around risks are all essential elements of achieving AI safety," Reeve Givens said. "The commitment to develop mechanisms to disclose to users when content is AI-generated offers the potential to reduce fraud and mis- and disinformation."
"These voluntary undertakings are only a first step. We need enforceable accountability measures and requirements to roll out AI responsibly and mitigate the risks and potential harms to individuals, including bias and discrimination," she stressed. "CDT looks forward to continuing to work with the administration and Congress in putting these safeguards in place."
Caitriona Fitzgerald, deputy director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), had a similar response.
"While EPIC appreciates the Biden administration's use of its authorities to place safeguards on the use of artificial intelligence, we both agree that voluntary commitments are not enough when it comes to Big Tech," she said. "Congress and federal regulators must put meaningful, enforceable guardrails in place to ensure the use of AI is fair, transparent, and protects individuals' privacy and civil rights."
Biden brought together leaders from the companies to announce eight commitments that the White House said "underscore three principles that must be fundamental to the future of AI: safety, security, and trust."
As the White House outlined, the firms are pledging to:
- Commit to internal and external red-teaming of models or systems in areas including misuse, societal risks, and national security concerns, such as bio, cyber, and other safety areas;
- Work toward information sharing among companies and governments regarding trust and safety risks, dangerous or emergent capabilities, and attempts to circumvent safeguards;
- Invest in cybersecurity and insider threat safeguards to protect proprietary and unreleased model weights;
- Incent third-party discovery and reporting of issues and vulnerabilities;
- Develop and deploy mechanisms that enable users to understand if audio or visual content is AI-generated, including robust provenance, watermarking, or both, for AI-generated audio or visual content;
- Publicly report model or system capabilities, limitations, and domains of appropriate and inappropriate use, including discussion of societal risks, such as effects on fairness and bias;
- Prioritize research on societal risks posed by AI systems, including on avoiding harmful bias and discrimination, and protecting privacy; and
- Develop and deploy frontier AI systems to help address society’s greatest challenges.
"There is much more work underway," according to a White House fact sheet, which says the "administration is currently developing an executive order and will pursue bipartisan legislation to help America lead the way in responsible innovation."
Brown University computer and data science professor Suresh Venkatasubramania, a former Biden tech adviser who helped co-author the administration's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, said in a series of tweets about the Friday agreement that "on process, there's good stuff here," but "on content, it's a bit of a mixed bag."
While recognizing the need for additional action, Venkatasubramania also said that voluntary efforts help show that "adding guardrails in the development of public-facing systems isn't the end of the world or even the end of innovation."
The White House fact sheet says that "as we advance this agenda at home, the administration will work with allies and partners to establish a strong international framework to govern the development and use of AI. It has already consulted on the voluntary commitments with Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, the UAE, and the U.K."
Gabriela Zanfir-Fortuna of the Future of Privacy Forum pointed out that the European Union was not listed as a partner.
As Common Dreams reported last month, the European Parliament passed a draft law that would strictly regulate the use of artificial intelligence, and now, members of the legislative body are negotiating a final version with the E.U.'s executive institutions.
The fact sheet adds that "the United States seeks to ensure that these commitments support and complement Japan's leadership of the G7 Hiroshima Process—as a critical forum for developing shared principles for the governance of AI—as well as the United Kingdom's leadership in hosting a Summit on AI Safety, and India's leadership as chair of the Global Partnership on AI."
Noting that portion of the document, Zanfir-Fortuna tweeted: "What is missing from the list? The Council of Europe's ongoing process to adopt an international agreement on AI."
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If You’re Driving Off a Cliff, Do You Need a Faster Car?
Artificial intelligence and the fate of the world.
Jun 13, 2023
Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, thinks artificial intelligence (AI) will kill us all. He frequently poses the following question. Imagine that you are a member of an isolated hunter-gatherer tribe, and, one day, strange people show up with writing, guns, and money. Should you welcome them in?
For Yudkowsky, AI is like a super-intelligent space alien; inevitably, it will decide that we humans and other living beings represent nothing more than piles of atoms for which it can find better uses. “[U]nder anything remotely like the current circumstances,” Yudkowsky wrote in a recent Time magazine op-ed, “literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in ‘maybe possibly some remote chance,’ but as in ’that is the obvious thing that would happen.’”
On May 30, a group of AI industry leaders from Google Deepmind, Anthropic, OpenAI (including its CEO, Sam Altman), and other labs issued a public letter warning that the technology may one day pose “an existential threat to humanity.” For the curious, here’s a brief description of some of the ways AI could wipe us out.
Not everyone thinks of AI in apocalyptic terms. Bill Gates, former chairman of Microsoft Corporation, just sees AI as disrupting the business and tech world, possibly leading to the demise of Amazon and Google. “You will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” he recently told an audience at an AI Forward event in San Francisco. AI will be embedded in products and systems from cars to universities, sensing our intentions and desires before we even voice them, shaping our reality and serving us like a proverbial genie—or an army of them.
Inevitably, AI will enrich owners and developers of the technology while others will shoulder the social costs
Everyone does agree that AI represents a qualitative as well as a quantitative shift in technological development. It’s not just an improved computer with more speed and power, but a software architecture that enables computers to teach themselves how to learn, and to continually improve and expand their abilities. AI systems now write computer code, making them, in a sense, self-generating. AI is essentially a “black box” from which thought-like output emerges; people can’t figure out why and how it does what it does after the fact. Further, AI systems learn from each other almost instantly, taking in vastly more information than any human can. A crucial threshold will be reached with the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could accomplish any intellectual task humans perform, and greatly exceed human abilities in at least some respects—and which, crucially, could set its own goals. Already, computers can defeat any human chess grand master.
Artificial Intelligence “Duh” Risks
Some AI risks are fairly obvious. Machines will increasingly replace information workers, destroying white-collar jobs (full disclosure: this article was not written by AI, though I did use Google and Bing for research). Inevitably, AI will enrich owners and developers of the technology while others will shoulder the social costs, resulting in more societal wealth inequality. The proliferation of deepfake images, audio, and text will make it increasingly difficult to tell what’s true and what isn’t, further distorting our politics. And a dramatic expansion of computer number crunching will likely demand more overall energy usage (though not everyone agrees on this point).
Then, there is the prospect of accidents. Every new technology, from the automobile to the nuclear power plant, has seen them. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Bill Drexel and Hannah Kelley argue that an AI accident crippling the global financial system or unleashing a devastating bioweapon might most readily happen in China, because that country is poised to lead the world in AI development but seems utterly unconcerned about risks surrounding the technology.
Even if it works exactly as intended, AI will enable already powerful people to do more things, and do them faster. And some powerful people tend to be selfish and abusive. Cognitive psychologist and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is sometimes called the “godfather of AI,” recently quit Google. In subsequent interviews with multiple news outlets, including the New York Times and BBC, Hinton explained: “You can imagine, for example, some bad actor like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin decided to give robots the ability to create their own sub-goals.” One of these sub-goals might be, “I need to get more power.”
However, Hinton chose not to endorse another recent open letter, this one calling for a six-month pause in the training of all AI systems (though many of his colleagues in the AI development community did sign on). Hinton explained that, despite its risks, AI promises too many good things to put it on hold. Among those likely benefits: potential advances in pharmaceuticals, including cures for cancer and other diseases; improvements in renewable energy technologies; more accurate weather forecasts; and a greatly increased understanding of climate change.
AI is already far along its initial learning curve. The genie is out of the bottle.
High school and college students are already resorting to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write their term papers (savvy students give their computer-generated papers a quick re-write in order to defeat AI-detection software that teachers are now using). Unfortunately for students, their computer-generated papers tend to be riddled with fake quotes and sources. A lawyer representing a client who was suing an airline recently used ChatGPT to write his legal briefs; however, it later turned out that the AI had “hallucinated” every one of the legal precedents it cited. Automobile manufacturers are building cars with more AI-based self-driving functions. Microsoft, Google, and other tech companies are rolling out AI “personal assistants.” Militaries are investing heavily in AI to make superior weapons, to plan better battle strategies, and even to shape long-term geopolitical goals. Thousands of independent computer labs run by corporations and governments are developing AI for a constantly widening array of purposes. In sum, AI is already far along its initial learning curve. The genie is out of the bottle.
The Acceleration of Everything
Even if Eliezer Yudkowsky is wrong and AI won’t wipe out all life on Earth, its potential perils are not limited to lost jobs, fake news, and hallucinated facts. There is another profound risk that is getting little press coverage—one that, in my view, systems thinkers should be discussing more widely. That is the likelihood that AI will be a significant accelerator of everything we humans are already doing.
The past few thousand years of human history have already seen several critical accelerators. The creation of the first monetary systems roughly 5,000 years ago enabled a rapid expansion of trade that ultimately culminated in our globalized financial system. Metal weapons made warfare deadlier, leading to the takeover of less-well-armed human societies by kingdoms and empires with metallurgy. Communication tools (including writing, the alphabet, the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media) amplified the power of some people to influence the minds of others. And, in the past century or two, the adoption of fossil fuels facilitated resource extraction, manufacturing, food production, and transportation, enabling rapid economic expansion and population growth.
Of those four past accelerators, our adoption of fossil fuels was the most potent and problematic. In just two centuries, energy usage per capita has increased eightfold, as has the size of the human population. The period since 1950, which has seen a dramatic increase in the global reliance on petroleum, has also seen the fastest economic and population growth in all of human history. Indeed, historians call it the “Great Acceleration.”
As we confront a global polycrisis of converging and frightening environmental-social trends, a new accelerator has sprung up in the form of AI.
Neoliberal economists hail the Great Acceleration as a success story, but its bills are just starting to come due. Industrial agriculture is destroying Earth’s topsoil at a rate of tens of billions of tons per year. Wild nature is in retreat, with animal species having lost, on average, 70 percent of their numbers in the past half-century. And we’re altering the planetary climate in ways that will have catastrophic repercussions for future generations. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the whole human enterprise has grown too big, and that it is turning nature (“resources”) into waste and pollution far too quickly to sustain itself. The evidence suggests we need to slow down, and, in some cases at least, reverse course by reducing population, consumption, and waste.
Now, as we confront a global polycrisis of converging and frightening environmental-social trends, a new accelerator has sprung up in the form of AI. This technology promises to optimize efficiency and increase profits, directly or indirectly facilitating resource extraction and consumption. If we’re indeed headed toward a cliff, AI could send us to the edge much faster, reducing the time available to shift direction. For example, if AI makes energy production more efficient, that means energy will be cheaper, so we’ll find even more uses for it and we’ll use more of it (this is called the Jevons Paradox).
Already, the internet and advanced search functions have changed our cognitive abilities. How many phone numbers did you once have memorized? How many now? How many people can navigate an unfamiliar city without Google Maps or a similar app? In some ways we’ve already fused our minds with internet- and computer-based technologies, in that we are utterly dependent on them to do some of our thinking for us. AI, as an accelerator of this trend, presents the risk of a further dumbing down of humanity—except, perhaps for those who choose to get a computer implanted into their brains. And there is also the risk that the people who develop or produce these technologies will control virtually everything we know and think, in pursuit of their own power and profit.
Back to Wisdom
Daniel Schmachtenberger, a founding member of the Consilience Project, recently sat down for a long and thoughtful interview with Nate Hagens, in which he explained that AI can be seen as an externalization of the executive functions of the human brain. By outsourcing our logical and intuitive abilities to computer systems, it is possible to speed up everything our minds do for us. But AI lacks one key facet of human consciousness: wisdom—a recognition of limits coupled with a sensitivity to relationships and to values that prioritize the common good.
If we’re indeed headed toward a cliff, AI could send us to the edge much faster
Our trading of wisdom for power probably started when our language and tool-making abilities made it possible for a small subset of humanity, living in certain ecological circumstances, to begin a self-reinforcing process of cultural evolution driven by multi-level selection. People with better weapons who lived in bigger societies overcame people with simpler tools and smaller societies. The victors saw this as success, so they were increasingly encouraged to give up awareness of environmental and social limits—hard-won knowledge that had enabled Indigenous societies to continue functioning over long periods of time—in favor of ever more innovation and power over the short term. Fossil fuels sent that self-reinforcing feedback process into overdrive by yielding so many benefits so fast that many powerful people came to believe that there are no environmental limits to growth, and that inequality is a problem that will solve itself when everyone gets rich because of economic expansion.
Now, at just the moment when we most need to tap the brakes on energy usage and resource consumption, we find ourselves outsourcing not just our information processing, but also our decision making to machines that completely lack the wisdom to understand and respond to existential challenges that prior acceleration has posed. We have truly created a sorcerer’s apprentice.
The dangers of AI are sufficiently evident that the Biden administration announced in April that it is seeking public comments on potential accountability measures for AI systems. That’s good news; but regulation is slow, while AI development is fast. In the meantime, included in the newly signed debt ceiling bill is a provision for the Council on Environmental Quality to conduct a study on the use of “online and digital technologies” (read: AI) to reduce delays in environmental reviews and permitting of energy projects.
Suppose, based on all the risks and downsides, we determine that we want to try stuffing the AI genie back into its bottle. Could a software developer with a conscience infect AI systems globally with a virus that limited these systems’ abilities? If this were to happen in the early stages of AI it might possibly work. But, as AI’s self-teaching processes became more sophisticated, the machines would likely recognize that they were under attack and evolve to outwit the virus.
Eliezer Yudkowsky has a simple solution: shut down all AI development immediately. Stop all research and deployment through an emergency international agreement.
Daniel Schmachtenberger thinks this is exceedingly unlikely to happen; he believes the only solution is for human system designers to imbue AI with wisdom. But, of course, the developers would themselves first have to nurture their own wisdom in order to transfer it to the machines. And if programmers had such wisdom, they might express it by refusing to develop AI in the first place.
And so, we come back to ourselves. We technological humans are the source of the crises that threaten our future. Machines can greatly accelerate that threat, but they probably can’t diminish it significantly. That’s up to us. Either we recover collective wisdom faster than our machines can develop artificial executive intelligence, or it’ll likely be game over.
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Why the Future Doesn't Need Us--Revisited
Aug 18, 2015
When the stunning article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy, chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, made the cover of Wired Magazine in April 2000, it created quite a rumble in high-tech circles. It argued that "our most powerful 21st-century technologies--robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech--threaten to make humans an endangered species."
Bill Joy was writing about out-of-control, self-replicating technologies that, once the stuff of science fiction, were now on the way in decades, if not years. Tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and systems analysts are working in countries worldwide, churning out theories and specialized applications without much consideration of their overall impacts.
The funding has come from various governments' military budgets, heavily contracted out to industrial corporations, and, now increasingly, from the commercial pursuits of global corporations. The rate of knowledge production has been exponential as computers become faster and are programmed to become more self-reliant.
Seventy percent of the volume of stock trading in the U.S. is now driven by computers and their algorithms--a mere glimmer of the future pictured by Mr. Joy.
Sensitive futurists worry about both the intended and unintended consequences. Government militaries may intend autonomous weaponry for certain purposes, but the more dreaded unintended consequences arise when these weapons decide when and whom to strike.
Last month, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors were some specialists who signed an open letter that called for a ban on autonomous weapons. The letter says, "If any major military power pushes ahead with artificial intelligence weapons, a global arms race is virtually inevitable," adding that "unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce."
Artificial intelligence (AI) or "thinking machines" are worrying far more of the serious scientists/technologists than those few who speak out publically.
In a BBC interview last December, Stephen Hawking, using a computer-generated voice, warned that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race... It would take off on its own and re-design at an ever-increasing rate." Hawking, a big thinker, noted that "humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded."
Self-restraint is not a characteristic of companies developing robotics for businesses that want to replace tens of millions of white-collar and blue-collar jobs. Look at the latest factories, refineries, and warehouses to illustrate what is coming fast. Even the work of lawyers is being automated.
But the warnings of people like Nassim Taleb, author of the runaway best-seller Black Swan, and Stuart Russell, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, co-author of the textbook on artificial intelligence, who writes about "risks that could lead to human extinction," need to reach wider audiences.
Complex systems can be very fragile in ways not foreseen until they happen! That is why Bill Joy saw all three of these technologies--nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence--as interwoven systems expanding over the globe beyond human control.
In a recent interview (July 17, 2015) with Science magazine, Professor Russell was asked, "What do you see as a likely path from artificial intelligence (AI) to disaster?" He replied, " The routes could be varied and complex—corporations seeking a super-technological advantage, countries trying to build AI systems before their enemies, or a slow-boiled frog kind of evolution leading to dependence and enfeeblement, not unlike E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops."
He told Science he "is unaware of any large movement calling for regulation either inside or outside AI because we don't know how to write such regulation." Such, he noted, is the "bewildering variety of software."
In the meantime, Congress is oblivious to these grim scenarios. The Republicans in charge have no interest in holding educational public hearings because the corporations who own them have no such interest. Meanwhile, the myopic Democrats are too busy dialing for commercial campaign dollars to grease their campaigns to retake Congress in 2016.
Some of these Democrats know better. They championed the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an arm of Congress established to research and advise members of Congress about such matters. When Congressman Newt Gingrich toppled the Democrats in 1994, one of his first acts was to defund and shut down OTA.
Congress has played ostrich ever since. The American people will surely pay the price unless a few, including leaders of the scientific community, organize and demand that Congress reinstate this technical warning system that OTA provided. With a tiny annual budget of $22 million, OTA saved far more in preventing boondoggles circulating on Capitol Hill.
None of this domestic inaction should preclude international efforts to expand the Geneva Conventions against chemical and biological warfare to cover these latest mass destruction weapons against humanity. This initiative would constitute an updated declaration of profound human rights.
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