President claimed that social media’s effects on young people’s mental health demonstrated damage that new technologies can cause if safety measures are not put in place.
Before making their products available to the general public, AI developers, according to Joe Biden, have a duty to make sure they are safe. President of the United States Joe Biden has stated that artificial intelligence (AI) “could be” dangerous, but it is still unclear how society will be impacted by the technology.
Biden stated that technology companies have a duty to make sure their products are secure before being released in his opening remarks to a meeting with advisers in the fields of science and technology on Tuesday.
At the beginning of a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Vice President Joe Biden said, “Tech companies have a responsibility, in my view, to make sure their products are safe before they are made public.” When asked if AI was dangerous, Biden responded, “it depends,” but “it could be.”
According to Biden, artificial intelligence (AI) could aid in the fight against diseases and climate change, but developers of the technology also need to consider “potential risks to our society, to our economy, and to our national security.”
The president claimed that social media’s effects on young people’s mental health demonstrated the damage that new technologies can cause if safety measures are not put in place. Biden’s comments come as the debate over how to regulate AI is heating up, with some well-known voices calling for a halt to the technology’s advancement until safety measures can be put in place.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, among others, called for a pause on the adoption of AI in an open letter that was published last month due to the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by the technology.
The latter was in response to GPT-4, the successor to the ground-breaking AI chatbot ChatGPT, being released. The newer platform, according to GPT-4’s California-based developer OpenAI, is capable of “human-level performance” in some situations, such as passing the bar exam with a score in the top 10 percent of candidates.
Italy was the first Western nation to outlaw ChatGPT last week after its data protection watchdog declared that there appeared to be “no legal basis” for the program’s extensive data collection. European Union legislators are negotiating regulations to govern the use of the technology across the 27-nation bloc.