Anarchy in the AI: Trump's desire to supercharge US tech faces plenty of hurdles

It’s 1976, and in the country of the Beatles, another guitar band is giving it some. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols isn’t so keen on love and blackbirds. Instead, he sings lustily that he wants to be an anarchist, destroying passers-by and in general promoting anarchy in the UK.

Skip forward half a century, and America’s own snarling, vituperative punk leader, Donald Trump, has picked up the theme. He is dead keen on anarchism in AI, removing the laws and regulations that normally modulate the desires of tech innovators by considerations of potential harm, fairness, and allowable practice. With those shackles off, Trump promises, American AI will rule the world.

There are more fundamental flaws in this approach than there are flies on a roadkill raccoon. The purpose of AI is to do useful work in the real world, much as a human does. Humans are notably fallible and do things that are harmful to others, sometimes by ignorance, sometimes by carelessness, sometimes through greed or malice. Which means people get regulated, told what not to do, and what happens when they do it anyway. This has been written down in an ongoing process for at least 4,000 years, frequently fallible and abused, but it’s the best we’ve got. With good faith and safeguards, it does the job of keeping us safe and potentially prosperous.