Tech Experts To Testify on ‘Rogue AI’ Before Senate Subcommittee

A small group of senators on Wednesday morning will question a number of technology experts on the threat of “Rogue AI” as concerns mount not just on Capitol Hill, but across the country. Trying to balance innovation with safety has become one of the few bipartisan efforts of this year. On Wednesday, Senator Josh Hawley will lead a hearing titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.” Mr. Hawley is hosting the session as chairman of the homeland security subcommittee on disaster management, which is composed of seven members — four Republicans and three Democrats. All seven lawmakers are expected to participate on Wednesday. “I think it’s really important that we really understand what they’re doing from a safety standpoint,” Senator Rick Scott, a GOP member of the subcommittee, tells the New York Sun. He says he wants to ensure that “our kids are safe” from the technology and that it does not “hurt mankind.” He says he shares President Trump’s goal of making sure that America will “beat China” in the AI race. Witnesses at Mr. Hawley’s hearing will include Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee who refused to sign a nondisparagement clause in order to publicly raise concerns about the company, Marius Hobbhahn, founder of the AI safety company Apollo Research, and Paul Ohm, a Georgetown University law professor who is an expert in the legal landscape around AI. Mr. Kokotajlo — who walked away from a payout worth $2 million so that he could publicly discuss risks of the technology — says he told his wife that they should not have any more children because there would be no job prospects for them once they grow up. “Absolutely everything is going to change for the whole world,” Mr. Kokotajlo said on an episode of “The Diary of a CEO” podcast earlier this year. He warns that things could “change for the better” or “could change for the worse” depending on the “details.”“For example, everyone could die,” Mr. Kokotajlo said. “If we do build these superintelligences and we use them to automate all the jobs and we put them in the military and we, you know, have them giving advice to politicians and so forth, they will eventually have accumulated enough real-world power that they don’t need humans anymore.”“At that point, we sort of have to hope that they’re virtuous,” he said. Though the subcommittee plans to host a wide-ranging discussion on AI risks on Wednesday, Mr. Trump has come down unreservedly on the side of those who believe new regulation is not necessary. After a lunch with major AI executives at the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump announced that “self-regulation” would likely be the law of the land, outside of existing powers at the Department of Justice. “There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that, but the self-regulation is very important,” Mr. Trump told reporters after the lunch. Speaking outside of the West Wing later, Mr. Trump announced that he and the executives had signed what he called a “morally binding” — not legally binding — commitment to ensuring safety and ethical development. The document, titled, “White House Accord on Super Intelligence” lays out several key promises for the continued development of what are called “frontier models.” The document is parallel to what Mr. Trump has been pushing, including a promise to establish “robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities” and guarantee safety in “areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats.”

Tech Experts To Testify on ‘Rogue AI’ Before Senate Subcommittee

Tech Experts To Testify on ‘Rogue AI’ Before Senate Subcommittee

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