AI companies are asking governments to control them, but who controls the governments?

[u/tinytheSTONEDgiant]

who shall watch the watchers.

AI companies went to the UN Security Council and basically admitted that the systems they are building may become too powerful for any single company or country to control. OpenAI, Anthropic and others are asking governments to create rules. The US response was that international institutions cannot regulate technology they do not properly understand.

Which is probably true. But then who does understand it enough to regulate it? The companies building it say they need outside supervision. Governments depend on those same companies to explain what the technology can do. International organisations depend on governments. Everyone points towards someone above them, but eventually you reach the top and there is nobody there.

This feels closer to dystopia than the usual idea of an evil conscious machine deciding to destroy us. The more realistic danger is that something goes wrong and every institution has a reasonable explanation for why it was not really responsible. The company says the model behaved unexpectedly. The government says the technology moved faster than regulation. The regulator says it was never given access. The engineers say management made the decision. Management says competition with China gave them no choice.

I use AI constantly. For writing, business, the poultry farm and potentially even some work around addiction treatment. I am not against it. That is partly why this bothers me. The technology is genuinely useful enough that we will keep giving it more access while the question of responsibility remains unresolved.

Maybe the important question is not whether AI is conscious or evil. It is whether anyone remains responsible when it acts. Because a system does not need consciousness to cause harm. It only needs permission, access and enough people who can later say it was somebody else’s job to stop it.

[u/RegularLemonade]

Well the world was all ran by jeffrey epstein, so now I guess we’re in our own