The AI backlash intensifies, China gains on the US leaders, and IBM tanks
You know a technology is getting serious acceptance when even people in the business shift from telling the government to butt out to calling for more regulation. This is where we’re at with artificial intelligence today.
A raft of AI leaders and economists this week called for a new regulatory approach to AI in part to address concerns such as potential job losses, following the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic and others tossing out their takes on how to do that. This week Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis also called for creating an AI standards body. Whether anything comes of all this remains uncertain.
Some who are more rabid in their opposition to AI’s impacts are even talking of potential violence, prompting some execs to hire armed bodyguards. Hopefully that proves to be overkill.
But meantime, the opposition to AI has fixated on data centers, with their impacts on local power, water and pollution. And they’re having some impact. New York Governor Kathy Hochul recently signed an executive order mandating the country’s first and no doubt not the last moratorium on data centers that power all this AI.
