Senate Candidate El-Sayed Says He’s Worried About AI’s Recursive Self-Improvement: We Need a SEC or FDA-Style Regulatory Agency

EXCERPT:

EL-SAYED: “So I just want to be clear about AI. I am really worried about the fact that we are about to open Pandora's box and nobody knows what's about to happen. We are at a point, anybody here seen 'Fantasia?' You know the 'Sources of Apprentice' point where the brooms are out there and they start making more brooms? That's what recursive self-improvement looks like. The CEOs of both OpenAI and Anthropic don't agree on everything, but they agree that this could take 50% of the white collar jobs in America. And the problem with that is that that transition is not going to happen over a 25 to 50 year time horizon. It's going to happen over a 5 to 10 year time horizon, meaning you go to college to get a job and then the job that you were supposed to get at the end of college doesn't exist anymore because it's been automated out. That beyond the question of what are these technologies able to do to slip human control or empower the worst actors, terrorists or rogue states to create bioweapons we can't even imagine. That's where we sit right now. And the physical footprint, data centers that they put in your backyard that have the potential to raise your utilities and poison your water, all for what? A few corporations that get to dominate it. So here's what I've said. We need AI under democracy and AI under control. AI should not be able to do certain things like fire weapons or fire you or deny your health care. We need an SEC or FDA-style regulatory agency that can oversee the development of these models to make sure we don't open Pandora's box only to hate it at the very end.”