9 October 2023

AI’s Present Matters More Than Its Imagined Future

Inioluwa Deborah Raji

Last month, I found myself in a particular seat. A few places to my left was Elon Musk. Down the table to my right sat Bill Gates. Across the room sat Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, and not too far to his left was Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. At the other end of the table sat Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT.

We had all arrived that morning for the inaugural meeting of Senate Leader Chuck Schumer’s AI Insight Forum—the first of a set of events with an ambitious objective: to accelerate a bipartisan path toward meaningful artificial-intelligence legislation. The crowd included senators, tech executives, civil-society representatives, and me—a UC Berkeley computer-science researcher tasked with bringing years of academic findings on AI accountability to the table.

I’m still unsure of what was achieved in that room. So much of the discussion was focused on concerns and promises outside the periphery—the most extreme dangers and benefits of AI—rather than on adopting a clear-eyed understanding of the here and now. Speculation about the future of AI is fine as long as we don’t spend all of our time daydreaming. But that’s precisely what’s happening as American lawmakers scramble into the realm of tangible AI rule-making.



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