Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast

The “godfather of AI” has left Google, offering warnings about the existential risks for humanity of the technology. Mark MacCarthy calls those risks a fantasy, and a debate breaks out between Mark, Nate Jones, and me. There’s more agreement on the White House summit on AI risks, which seems to have followed Mark’s “let’s worry about tomorrow tomorrow” prescription. I think existential risks are a bigger concern, but I am deeply skeptical about other efforts to regulate AI, especially for bias, as readers of Cybertoonz know. I argue again that regulatory efforts to eliminate bias are an ill-disguised effort to impose quotas more widely, which provokes lively pushback from Jim Dempsey and Mark. Other prospective AI regulators, from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)’s Lina Khan to the Italian data protection agency, come in for commentary. I’m struck by the caution both have shown, perhaps due to their recognizing the difficulty of applying old regulatory frameworks to this new technology. It’s not, I su