The age of AI politics is here
bloomberg.com
Will artificial intelligence (AI) have an adverse impact on the 2024 US presidential election? asks Niall Ferguson. “It seems highly likely.” US election campaigns have much larger budgets than those of other developed countries, and each new communications technology is rapidly adopted by “political entrepreneurs” – consider what Google did for Barack Obama in 2012, or Facebook advertisements for Donald Trump in 2016, or Big Tech’s “content moderation” for Joe Biden in 2020.
AI has “immense potential to make a political impact” in the election, and it is already being deployed. We have already seen, in the New Hampshire primaries, the first fake phone calls made by AI bots claiming to be Biden, for example. AI can rapidly produce material, without human oversight, that survey respondents see as being just as credible as material on the same subject from The New York Times. When voters are primed to become aware of “deepfake”, AI-generated videos, they do not get better at identifying them, but do lose trust in real videos.
Full speed ahead
All this will probably generate public pressure for regulation, but is AI likely to be curbed by this? Probably not, at least not anytime soon. In the US, Congress has a record of regulating new technologies very slowly, and already-proposed regulations are either not “toothy” enough, or are unlikely to pass Congress. The EU’s hope to lead AI regulation as it did data security is also unlikely to succeed, not least because it is home to hardly any major AI companies. And the formation of a global AI governance regime, as some advocate, is not going to happen in the short or medium term. There will, in short, be few restraints on the “AI arms race”, which will “continue at breakneck pace”.
The implications go beyond internal politics. China is currently lagging in the AI race, but it is ahead in robots, and the main thing holding it back in AI is access to sophisticated chips – almost all of which are produced on an island China claims as its own, Taiwan. AI also promises to make missiles and other weapons much more accurate, increasing the cost of warfare in human terms. The age of AI warfare is upon us.
The cost in terms of energy will also be astronomical. Some analysts have projected that AI could end up needing close to a quarter of electricity generation by 2030. More sober ones say 4.5%. “Either way, it’s a lot.” In recent weeks, the media has been waking up to what this implies for increasing the share of electricity from “renewable” sources. “That dream is dead.”