philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Bill Foster, a particle physicist-turned-congressman, on why he’s worried about artificial general intelligence

… When I started making noise about this inside the caucus, people expected the first jobs to fall would be factory assembly line workers, long haul truck drivers, taxi drivers. That’s taken longer than people guessed right then. But the other thing that’s happened that’s surprised people is how quickly the creative arts have come under assault from AI. … There’s a lot of nervousness among teachers about what exactly are the careers of the future that we’re actually training people for.

… I think one of the most important responses — something that the government can actually deliver and even deliver this session of Congress — is to provide people some way of defending themselves against deepfakes. … There’s two approaches to this. The first thing is to try to imagine that you can detect fraudulent media and to develop software to detect deepfake material. I’m not optimistic that that’s going to work. It’s going to be a cat-and-mouse game forever. … Another approach is to provide citizens with a means of proving they are who they say they are online and they are not a deepfake. 

FS: An authentication service? 

BF: A mobile ID. A digital driver’s license or a secure digital identity. This is a way for someone to use their cell phone and their government-provided credential, like a passport or Real ID-compliant driver’s license, and associate it with your cell phones [This could] take advantage of your cell phone’s ability through AI to recognize its owner — and also the modern cell phone’s ability to be used like a security dongle. It has what’s called a secure enclave, or a secure compute facility, that allows it to hold private encryption keys that makes the device essentially a unique device in the world that can be associated with a unique person and their credential. ...

FS: How optimistic are you that this new AI task force is actually going to produce legislation?

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BF: One reason I’m optimistic is the Republican’s choice of a chair: Jay Obernolte. … He’s another guy who keeps up the effort to maintain his technical currency. He and I can geek out about the actual state of the art, which is rather rare in the U.S. Congress. … One of the missions, certainly for this task force, will be to try to educate members about at least the capabilities of AI. ...

FS: How worried are you about artificial general intelligence?

BF: Over the last five years, I’ve become much more worried than I previously was. And the reason for that is there’s this analogy between the evolution of AI algorithms and the evolution in living organisms. And what if you look at living organisms and the strategies that have evolved, many of them are deceptive. ...

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