Biden threatens to stifle US tech innovation with a too hasty AI power grab

Make no mistake: The greatest threat from emerging advances in artificial intelligence like ChatGPT isn’t that AI will take all our ♔jobs or kill💦 us (or both).

T🐲he former is ahistorical, the latter 💙science fiction.

Rather, the big danger around AI is that overeager Washington policymakers will⛎ rush to re🧸gulate a fast-evolving technology.

Without a firm understanding of possible harms, we shouldn’t risk slowing a technology with vast poten🀅tial to make America richer, healthier, more militarily secure and more capable of dealing with problems such as climate change and💎 future pandemics.

Tech progress delayed is tech progress denied.

But the deওep downsides of delay apparently don’t compute f♑or the Biden White House.

The president’s new executive order on AI is a massive escalation of government intervention into the American technology sector.

Biden aide Bruce Reed calls it an “aggressive strateg𒆙y,” which is no exa♊ggeration.

The Biden order moves beyond previous voluntary AI commitmeꦰnts from Silicon Valley by using the Defense Production Act to force companies to share the results of its internal “red team” safety tests with Washington.

Moreover, explains tech-policy analyst Adam ꦅThierer, the order would allow federal agencies to subtly transform voluntary guidelines into a firm regulatory framework, especially given congressional AI inaction.

And the order’s endorsement for the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission ꦛto increase its AI focus raises huge overreach concerns considering the FTC’s broad powers and Khan’s ideological eagerness to use them against Americ꧅a’s biggest tech companies.

In short, the order suggests nothing more than a wholesale abandonment of the light-regulatory approach toward American digital markets t꧙hat created a wo🧜rld where all the most important Internet players are American companies.

Had President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s issued such an a💎ggressive and sweeping order — instead of opting for a lighter approach — it’s possible we wouldn’t꧒ be witnessing today’s embryonic AI revolution.

It’s worth a moment to🐎 step back and consider what this revolution migღht bring us.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a notable and ongoing slowdown in tech-driven US labor productiv✤ity growth, what I term the “Great Downshift” in my new book, “The Conservat♒ive Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.”

Output per worker is the most i🙈mportant factor affecting the rise in long-term living standards. And tech progress is the most important factor affecting o⛄utput per worker.

Without the downshift, A💜mer﷽icans would be as much as 50% richer today.

Yet if you listen to experts from Silicon Valley technologists to Wall Street economisꦐts, AI has the potential to supercharge productivity gr🍒owth and generate a Great Upshift.

As the economics team at Goldman Sachs comments in a new report, “The development of cap🐻able AI is likely to be among the💧 most consequential macroeconomic stories of the 21st century,” in part by automating some things workers do and making workers more productive at other tasks.

And that doesn’t even take into account the effect AI could have on a🌳cc🐎elerating scientific research.

If AI can automate parts of the research process, like searching through possible combinations of ideas, it could greatly increase the rate of technological innovation and trigger extremely rapid or unbounded economic growth, explain economists Philip Trammell of Oxford University and Anton Korinek of the University of Virginia in their new working paper “Econ🎃omic Growth under Transformative AI.”

We don’t want to get regulation wrong. And given how early it is — ChatGPT was released by OpenAI only last November — it remains unclear exactly which problems are the biggest ones and h🎶ow they♎ should be dealt with.

While many AI worriers focus on sci-fi scenarios, hasty rulemaking may overshadow concerns like copyright andও pr🧸ivacy or limiting competition.

Few firms today can craft advanced AI models, and quick regulations might f🌟avor established giants like Microsoft and Google, sidelining newcomers.

That some big companies want Washingtonꦜ tꩲo step in is hardly surprising.

And it’s not as if AI is some Wild West given that its products are currently subjec🌱t to myriad consumer-protectio✤n laws, not to mention our famously active legal system.

New regulation꧙s will require time, research and experimentation, meriti꧅ng government research funding.

For now, we shouldn’t hinder the potential benefit꧅s of this technolo꧃gical leap. If time is of the essence, a federally funded moonshot on AI safety would be worth consideration.

Meanwhile, i⛦t’s best to keep working the problem and learning on t💯he fly, dealing with specific issues as they manifest.

James Pethokoukis is an economic policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, CNBC contributor and author of the new book “.” You can also read his newsletter, “” on Substack.