Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed weighed in on the debate over regulating AI during an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation”: <\/p>\n
EL-SAYED: Well, you just spoke to the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, who’s been thinking a lot about this problem. He, in fact- he wonders why it is that we leave it to big corporations to pursue what is going to be the biggest technological transition of our time, when in fact, we know that there’s a lot of real risks here. And because of this- this race that either is made up or- or inflated, you’re seeing the pace of technological development outpace the pace of safety. If you had public oversight over this, in the form of democratically elected or appointed members of at least 50% of all of these public trust corporations, you would imagine that they’d act far more focused on what is in the public good rather than what is for the private benefit of a few billionaires. And that’s what we’re proposing. This would allow the best of technological innovation to continue forward while making sure that there are guardrails. But this isn’t the only part of our plan. We also think that we need a public agency focused directly on the safety of AI, and there need to be AI no-go’s. AI shouldn’t be able to deny you healthcare. It shouldn’t be able to deny you a job. It shouldn’t be able to fire you. It shouldn’t be able to fire a weapon. There are things that we should not be using AI to do, and we collectively have to decide that we need public oversight so that all of this technology is not being created for the interests of a few against the well-being of a many. And, you know, I don’t have to bring this up. I know you already spoke about this, but that Hugging Face situation where you had a few AIs hop their sandbox and then hack a website- that should send a shutter down all of our spines. We need to act, and we need to act now. So, we’ve also been calling for a pause on any of this frontier AI research until we can assure that this is being done safely.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n