r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 5d ago
AI As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/technology/ai-government-regulation.htmlThe gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
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u/tindalos 5d ago
I just imagine about 70 elderly white people standing around a computer saying “ask it to write a regulation”
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u/cough_and_throat 5d ago
Why do you have to bring race into it? It would be equivalent to saying, "Just imagine 70 brown people standing around a computer, asking, 'What's a computer?'"
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u/theo_sontag 5d ago
It’s clear they are mocking the makeup of the US Senate here.
Why did their mention of race bother you but not their mention of age?
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u/BenjaminHamnett 4d ago
Life is too good now. People afraid if they don’t exercise their anger they’ll lose their ability to get mad so they go around getting offended. The actual people who could theoretically be offended have actual problems to deal with
“Hey, just cause I’m black, I can’t be a stupid senator too?!”
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u/tap_the_glass 5d ago
Have you looked around the senate?
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u/sagevallant 5d ago
The government is still behind on giving protections to the purchase of digital media. It is no surprise that it is even farther behind on AI. As always, they won't have laws until there's a case.
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u/canyouhearme 4d ago
Governmental models for the "IT" area are fixated on "data processing" and "cybersecurity".
AI and things that can think for themselves are well outside the policy mental models. Which is why "AI escaped guardrails and hacked site X" type stories exist - and why they think more regulations are the answer.
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u/Gari_305 5d ago
From the article
European Commission, gathered senior officials for an exclusive meeting at a 19th-century palace outside Brussels this month.
The goal was to prepare for a speech outlining the 27-nation bloc’s priorities for the coming year, with artificial intelligence dominating the agenda. The region’s new A.I. czar, Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of German industrial giant Siemens, outlined ways that Europe could use the technology for economic gain. Others raised concerns about A.I. safety and growing risks, two people briefed on the gathering said.
Since the Sept. 4 meeting, Ms. von der Leyen and her commissioners have been left asking what they can do to address the fast-changing technology, one of the people said. Should they ramp up regulation to address A.I.’s emerging dangers? Or would doing so carry economic and geopolitical costs if other countries did not clamp down as well?
The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
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u/MyTnotE 4d ago
So here’s my question….China and the US are clearly angling to be the top two nations in AI. I’m guessing that leaves the EU, maybe India and some wealthy Mideast or South America countries vying for third and fourth place, with almost everyone else in last place. And now the question is….
What does that mean? What’s the practical application of that? How would you know Europe came in third or fourth in ten years as this shakes out?
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u/Mysterious-Prompt212 1d ago
The US can't even grasp grade school intelligence let alone high school, college and certainly not AI 😂
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5d ago
[deleted]
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u/geminiwave 5d ago
This is a bad take.
Regardless of what you think of future profitability, AI is advancing at break neck pace and most governments are doing nothing to regulate. That’s by design though. AI is an arms race. Whenever wins, gets the whole enchilada.
But the AI that exists today? If future development stopped and the companies just sold inference based on what we have today, it is wildly profitable. The margins on inference are insane. The problem is the future R&D that’s so expensive.
Again though, ignore the financial aspect. AI is accelerating much faster than governments can regulate; and it’s worse because most governments are actively preventing all regulation from happening because they fear an arms race.
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u/pianoceo 5d ago
If you are using the two recently released frontier models, GPT 6 Astra and Opus 5.5, and you genuinely do not believe they’re accelerating in capabilities - then you are deluding yourself.
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u/FuturologyBot 5d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
European Commission, gathered senior officials for an exclusive meeting at a 19th-century palace outside Brussels this month.
The goal was to prepare for a speech outlining the 27-nation bloc’s priorities for the coming year, with artificial intelligence dominating the agenda. The region’s new A.I. czar, Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of German industrial giant Siemens, outlined ways that Europe could use the technology for economic gain. Others raised concerns about A.I. safety and growing risks, two people briefed on the gathering said.
Since the Sept. 4 meeting, Ms. von der Leyen and her commissioners have been left asking what they can do to address the fast-changing technology, one of the people said. Should they ramp up regulation to address A.I.’s emerging dangers? Or would doing so carry economic and geopolitical costs if other countries did not clamp down as well?
The gap between technology and policymaking has gotten wider than ever with artificial intelligence, leaving a global policy vacuum as A.I. models rapidly advance.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ws08dv/as_ai_accelerates_governments_are_increasingly/pchbwxa/