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US President Joe Biden has signed an executive order on Artificial Intelligence seeking to rein in bad actors and threat of the cutting edge technology to the general public.
Biden’s order comes as a blueprint that gives a thematic direction to future laws governing the Artificial Intelligence in the country.
The order promulgated Monday entrusted several US departments, such as Homeland Security and Defense, to come up with rules and regulations with respect to the technology that has stoked concerns about its potential misuse across the world.
"The rapid speed at which AI capabilities are advancing compels the United States to lead in this moment for the sake of our security, economy, and society," Biden said in the order.
The developments in the field of AI have driven a thick wedge in the scientific and technology communities, with votaries on either side often resorting to superlatives to describe its potential.
The AI boom has sent the demand for the semiconductors and database servers skyrocketing, causing an overwhelming advantage to a handful of key players. The order seeks to address that lopsidedness by bringing a stop to "unlawful collusion and addressing risks from dominant firms’ use of key assets such as semiconductors, computing power, cloud storage, and data to disadvantage competitors."
It seeks to "develop effective labelling and content provenance mechanisms, so that Americans are able to determine when content is generated using AI and when it is not" as well as to ensure that the collection, use, and retention of data used by AI-deploying firms is within law.
Biden asked the Defense and Homeland Security secretaries to complete a pilot project within six months of the order to develop and deploy AI capabilities to detect vulnerabilities in the critical government infrastructure and plug those holes.
The US with its comprehensive guardrails has joined the likes of UK and China, which have come up with their versions of laws governing the AI.
Alarm bells haven’t stop ringing ever since ChatGPT, an interactive chatbot developed by OpenAI, caught the world's attention with its seemingly smart capabilities to give detailed answers.
Geoffrey Hinton, commonly referred to as ‘Godfather of AI, in May this year quit Google, which had hired him in 2012 to help build a neural network. As he quit, the scientist called the technology "too scary."
"Right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipses a person in the amount of general knowledge it has and it eclipses them by a long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning," he told BBC in May. "And given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast. So we need to worry about that."
Google DeepMind CEO and co-founder Shane Legg in a podcast recently said there is 50 per cent chance that machines with achieve human-like intelligence or Artificial General Intelligence in the next five years.
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