How to Avoid Repeating the Self-Regulatory Fallacy with AI

Linda Griffin is Vice President of Public Policy at Mozilla. Pres. Joe Biden announced his administration has secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies to ensure AI safety, July 21, 2023. Source: White House As governments and society-at-large grapple with the implications of artificial intelligence (AI), we’re living through a time of eerie deja vu when it comes to tech regulation. Major corporations are doing their best to assure the public and lawmakers that they know what’s right. If we only leave it to them to decide what’s next for AI, they seem to be saying, everything will be ok.  We’ve been through this before at the birth of both the internet and social media. We know precisely what happens when we allow a few giant companies to determine the future of technical progress. We have a chance to forge a different path, and take steps to ensure this great technical revolution brings maximum possible benefit to us all.  There have been some positive early first steps, but they’ve been matched by many of the tried-and-true efforts at deflection we’ve repeatedly seen from tech giants over the last 30 years. And because we’ve all been through this before, we can see these efforts for precisely what they are: attempts to monopolize markets and control the future of another promising new wave of technology. In a nod to the ubiquity of AI and its far-reaching implications, the White House recently released a series of voluntary “Commitments to Ensuring Safe, Secure, and…How to Avoid Repeating the Self-Regulatory Fallacy with AI