Only Congress can (and must) tap brakes on AI

You could almost hear palms smacking onto foreheads all over the techier corners of the internet this week, after a Google artificial intelligence program began generating pictures of Black founding fathers, a female Pope and other notions that would exist only in the most fringe-progressive alternate reality.

No, the culprit wasn’t some obsessively “woke” technocrat flailing at his keyboard. It was the unintended result of a legitimate but overly rushed attempt by Google to program out AI’s disturbing tendency toward racism and misogyny (a tendency that, it must be said, arises logically from the fact that it gets most of its information from an internet that reflects American culture).

The episode illustrates just one of the many unforeseen challenges ahead regarding a technology that holds more promise — and more potential for societal havoc — than any since the creation of the internet itself.

Chief among those challenges may be the fact that this powerful new technology today requires, more than anything, careful and deliberate development.

Yet all the incentives for the companies doing the developing — Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and a galaxy of less-familiar names — are trying to roll out their programs as quickly as possible in what amounts to an AI arms race.

The implications are too far-reaching to leave them to the profit-driven feeding frenzy that is the tech industry today. Congress must stop dithering on AI and set up a regulatory structure as soon as possible to govern its development and use.

AI is the quest to create programs that combine the massive, lightning-fast data processing capacity of computers with the ability to creatively reason, analyze and produce original ideas — to “think,” as humans do.

Whether that last part can ever truly be achieved is a towering question for both programmers and philosophers. But the positive practical applications already are astonishing. Medical diagnostics, drug discovery, manufacturing robotics, educational materials, cybersecurity, transportation advances, retail efficiencies — these are only a few of the many real-world endeavors where some form of AI is being regularly utilized right now to carry out complex processes faster and better than people alone can.