Try to think of leading names in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Kamala Harris is probably not the first that springs to mind. The woman can barely talk. But she is Vice President of the United States of America and as such she’s in London, about to give a speech ahead of Rishi Sunak’s big AI summit. Brace yourselves.
Harris’s speeches often sound as if they had been scripted by an early or pre-intelligent incarnation of ChatGPT. But as sentient beings we can safely predict her gist. The advent of Artificial Intelligence brings many opportunities, Harris will say, but the technology must be carefully controlled to ensure it doesn’t become harmful. And that, in Kamala Harris’s world, means heavily regulating all AI systems to bring them in line with the Democratic Party’s ultra-progressive and hyper-politically correct values.
The Biden-Harris administration is trying to force all AI to pursue the goal of racial equity
We know this because we can see that yesterday, in advance of Harris’s arrival in the United Kingdom, President Joe Biden issued his Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence – in the words of a White House communique, ‘the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems’. We can say, with a 91 per cent degree of certainty, that Harris will robotically echo its directives today. Rishi Sunak wants the United Kingdom to be a global hub of AI regulation, because those who can’t innovate, regulate. But it is the United States’s federal government, overseeing as it does Silicon Valley and the most advanced technology companies in the world, which calls the shots.
Biden’s Executive Order on AI safety focuses on a lot of areas which any good government should focus on. The need to ensure AI doesn’t instruct lunatics to make a biological weapon, for instance, or perpetuate fraudulent schemes by impersonating real people. It calls for ‘privacy-preserving techniques’ and seeks to impose government-on-government restrictions to stop federal agencies, as much as private companies, gathering too much information.
That’s the sane stuff. But there is another all-too sweeping section: on using AI to advance ‘equity and civil rights’ and that’s where sensible governance starts creeping towards social engineering on a terrifying scale. We know already that ChatGPT, for all its brilliance, is conditioned to be what Elon Musk has called ‘Woke AI’ – it refuses to address scientific enquiries which might offend people, for instance. ChatGPT will make jokes about Jesus, but not Muhammad. That political correctness may be irrational, but it was at least imposed by Open AI, a profit-seeking company. Other companies developing generative systems do not have to follow suit.
What the Biden-Harris administration is trying to do is force all AI to pursue the goal of racial equity – a nebulous concept that the White House has since January 2021 been imposing on American education, housing, healthcare, military contracting and much else. Team Biden wants to stop ‘AI algorithms from being used to exacerbate discrimination’. With Biden’s ‘equity agenda’ – take housing grants, for instance – that often means discriminating against white people in order to somehow equalise the historic oppression of black people.
It’s here that the White House’s Order takes on a chillingly dystopian tone: the Biden administration wants to ‘address algorithmic discrimination through training, technical assistance, and coordination between the Department of Justice and Federal civil rights offices on best practices for investigating and prosecuting civil rights violations related to AI.’
On criminal justice, the Biden administration wants to develop ‘best practices on the use of AI in sentencing, parole and probation, pretrial release and detention, risk assessments, surveillance, crime forecasting and predictive policing, and forensic analysis.’ The language is vague, almost suspiciously so, but what this boils down to is an attempt to plug the Democratic Party’s identity-oriented values into all AI programming.
ChatGPT is intelligent in large part because, similar to how we think the brain works, the system learns through the ‘backward propagation of errors’. This is complicated stuff, but it essentially means it can be tuned to think along certain pathways. It can be forced, then, to learn things that are not rational or true.
What the Biden administration is doing, by inserting its controversial equity agenda as ‘safety’ regulation, is politicising AI. It is on the brink of forcing companies to reinforce AI learning away, potentially, from the truth. In other words, AI may be compelled to propagate falsehoods in order to comply with a woke vision of the world that isn’t based on reality. One expert I spoke to suggested that this was comparable to the government hijacking Google in the year 2000 and controlling it to only share far-left websites. Unless you happen to be a far-left radical, the consequences of that cannot be good.
Tomorrow, Rishi Sunak will talk to Elon Musk, who is at least aware of this danger. Let’s hope he makes that point loud and clear. Not that Kamala Harris, a not very intelligent system, would ever listen.
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