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Congress has started taking AGI more seriously

peterwildeford.substack.com · 2,385 words · saved by 1 readers

This week a sitting representative in US Congress, Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI), asked what might be the most important question in any Congressional hearing: Stop and think about what a US Representative just asked. The question wasn’t whether China might attack us with AI. It wasn’t about the need to race with China. The question was about whether anyone’s AI might become powerful enough that the nation loses control of the AI and the AI becomes an independent global actor. The hearing was entitled “Algorithms and Authoritarians: Why U.S. AI Must Lead”. But what was supposed to be a routine House hearing about US-China competition became the most AGI-serious Congressional discussion in history. The committee was realizing in real-time that when we talk AI, we’re not talking merely about better chatbots. We're talking about AI systems that might learn how to improve themselves, become superintelligent, and then independently challenge the global order. This is where the AGI conversation is

This week a sitting representative in US Congress, Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI), asked what might be the most important question in any Congressional hearing: Stop and think about what a US Representative just asked. The question wasn’t whether China might attack us with AI. It wasn’t about the need to race with China. The question was about whether anyone’s AI might become powerful enough that the nation loses control of the AI and the AI becomes an independent global actor. The hearing was entitled “Algorithms and Authoritarians: Why U.S. AI Must Lead”. But what was supposed to be a routine…

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