The Guttenberg galaxy and the world of printing were born in Mainz (Germany); the industrial revolution, in the textile factories of Manchester; the atomic bomb, in the New Mexico desert courtesy of Robert Oppenheimer, and the computer has almost as many parents as there are elite universities in the United States, from Pennsylvania to MIT in Massachusetts. Now Washington, the EU and the United Kingdom are vying for leadership in regulating the next great technological step in human history, artificial intelligence.
The main conclusion of the AI summit held the last two days in Bletchley Park (a highly symbolic setting because the Nazi codes were deciphered there in World War II) is not so much a theoretical desire to cooperate so that the invention does not get out of hand. (signed in a statement) as the battle to decide who or who has the upper hand.
Everyone takes positions to leave their mark and take the initiative. A few days ago, North American President Joe Biden signed an executive order that basically obliges high tech companies to provide the Government with all relevant information about the new software systems they develop in AI; The EU is finalizing its own, more invasive Artificial Intelligence law, which will allow draconian measures and the closure of services that, from Brussels, are considered to be “harmful to society”; and the United Kingdom intends to act as a kind of global intermediary in the regulatory process, and thus demonstrate (which is not entirely clear) that it continues to be relevant in geopolitics despite Brexit and having become something like those icebergs that They float in the Atlantic, between North America and the European continent.
For this purpose, the British conservative leader, Rishi Sunak, organized the Bletchley Park summit, with the presence of a hundred academics, scientists and businessmen, as well as representatives from thirty countries. Yesterday, in a diplomatic marathon, he held bilateral meetings with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen; the Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, and the Secretary General of the UN, António Guterres. The day before she had done so with the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris, whose gesture of delivering her speech at the North American embassy in London (instead of at the meeting) was not liked by Downing Street. Competitive things.
“AI offers enormous opportunities, but it also carries risks, and we have to act quickly to confront them given how quickly the technology is advancing (a new version of ChatGPT one hundred times more powerful is expected within a year),” said Sunak. at the closing of the summit. But alarm should not spread, because we have the necessary tools to achieve it.” The United Kingdom is in favor of less regulation than what the EU has planned, and says that Brexit gives it the necessary freedom to act as a global leader on the issue.
Everyone agrees that AI needs to be regulated, but the question is to what extent. “What cannot be is for companies in the sector to correct their own exams,” said Sunak. But former Liberal deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, who left politics to become president of global affairs at Meta (a spectacular hit), led the campaign at Bletchley Park to limit government intrusion (he had no shortage of allies), arguing that “the capacity of AI should not be exaggerated.”
Asked at the press conference about one of the big concerns, whether robots will perform many of the functions that people do today, Sunak wanted to be optimistic: “We have to see AI more as a co-pilot that will help us direct the ship. than as an enemy that will steal our jobs and our way of earning a living. Some sectors will benefit and others will be harmed, as is the case with all technological innovations, but for the moment it has already served to create ten thousand jobs, and will create many millions more.” Not all participants in the summit shared that rosy, happy-ending movie vision.
The powers fight over who sets the pace and sets the content of the inevitable regulation of AI, and high tech companies (xAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google's Deep Mind, Open AI...) ask to regulate themselves, as they did banks before the financial collapse of 2008 (“trust us”), from which the economy has not yet recovered. Perhaps with the future of humanity at stake, it's a lesson to keep in mind a bit.
