Vice President Kamala Harris delivers welcoming remarks at a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, June 13, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
Joe Biden has named Kamala Harris as America’s “AI czar.” If her performance is similar to her time as the “border czar,” America will be run by a despotic artificial intelligence overlord in no time. At The Spectator, Angus Colwell laments Harris’s elevation to the new post, writing:
At least Kamala Harris managed to avoid the dreaded phrase that we should harness AI’s “potential.”
But that was just about the only blessing in the vice-president’s impressively trashy speech yesterday at the US Embassy in London.
Artificial intelligence, it is generally agreed, is the most important issue facing humanity, yet all we had was fourteen minutes of waffle from the veep. Still, it was nice of her to turn up.
Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of artificial intelligence. You can read that one of two ways: either Biden thinks that Kamala Harris is perfectly suited to grappling with the gravest existential threat, or that he thinks this AI malarkey is all a bit airy, so that looks like a good one for giving Kamala something to do.
Diplomats, journalists, philanthropists, a former prime minister and a Michelin-star chef were all escorted down to Nine Elms to see the consequences of Biden’s delegating, at the newish American embassy. The architect Bertrand Goldberg once said that no right angles exist in nature, so none should exist in buildings. The US embassy is not a natural place, then. Every edge looked like it could injure. Half an hour before the speech, interns flocked about, ironing the many Stars and Stripes. Outside, it was somehow raining upwards.
Harris was a little late on stage: not Axl Rose late, but enough for everyone to worry she was having an attack of nerves, or maybe dusting off the speech. She spoke very slowly, in the hazy inflection of her native California, and looked all misty-eyed.
She acknowledged within the first few minutes of speaking that AI could kill us all. Not explicitly, though: that’s too much to think about on a Wednesday morning. Just that it could make bioweapon-engineering and cyber-attacking a bit easier. The upsides, Harris said, are great: it could cure illness, empower farmers and help us tackle climate change. But, she said, we need to address “the full spectrum of AI risk.” So that means being alert to discrimination:
Consider, for example, when a senior is kicked off his healthcare plan because of a faulty AI algorithm. Is that not existential for him? When a woman is threatened by an abusive partner with explicit deepfake photographs? Is that not existential for her? When a young father is wrongfully imprisoned because of biased AI facial recognition. Is that not existential for his family? And when people around the world cannot discern fact from fiction because of a flood of AI-enabled myths and disinformation, I ask, is that not existential for democracy?
There’s a problem with that, though. Humans are already pretty rotten at all of those things. Seniors are accidentally kicked off their healthcare plans all the time. Disinformation is a permanent evil: it hasn’t been magicked into existence by AI. And we don’t need much help wrongfully imprisoning people. AI is meant to compensate for human error, whereas Kamala Harris seems to think it will create errors out of nothing. There was nothing about AI being a good thing for democracy: like widening human knowledge through ChatGPT, for example. I have found AI pretty democratic.
Read more here.
Is Obama Running the White House Behind the Scenes?
Interestingly, NBC has reported that behind the scenes, former President Barack Obama is wielding power over America’s artificial intelligence future. Fox & Friends host Rachel Campos-Duffy tweeted about the report:
They told us Kamala Harris was in charge of Artificial Intelligence policy for the White House. Now we learn it’s really Obama. The real question is what ISN’T Obama in charge of in the Biden administration. https://t.co/nJEiyd0FAF
— Rachel Campos-Duffy (@RCamposDuffy) November 3, 2023
Harris’s Mission Is to Make AI “Woke”
At Fox News, Brandon Gillespie notes that part of Harris’s mission with AI is to stop “algorithmic discrimination” and ensure the benefits of AI are “shared equally.” In the words of the American Accountability Foundation, Harris’s job is to “use AI to promote woke, progressive ideology,” according to Gillespie. He continues:
“Under the guise of fighting ‘algorithmic discrimination’ and ‘harmful bias,’ the Biden administration is trying to rig AI to follow the woke left’s rules,” AAF president Tom Jones told Fox News Digital in August.
“Biden is being advised on technology policy, not by scientists, but by racially obsessed social academics and activists. We’re already seen the biggest tech firms in the world, like Google under Eric Schmidt, use their power to push the left’s agenda. This would take the tech/woke alliance to a whole new, truly terrifying level,” Jones said.
The AAF cited the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights as an example.
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