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Artificial Intelligence

Poll: Despite global pressure, Americans want the tech industry to slow down on AI

Published

4 months ago

6 minute read

From The Deep View

A little more than a year ago, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Of course, the pause never happened (and we didn’t seem to stumble upon superintelligence in the interim, either) but it did elicit a narrative from the tech sector that, for a number of reasons, a pause would be dangerous.
  • One of these reasons was simple: sure, the European Union could potentially instate a pause on development — maybe the U.S. could do so as well — but there’s nothing that would require other countries to pause, which would let these other countries (namely, China and Russia) to get ahead of the U.S. in the ‘global AI arms race.’
As the Pause AI organization themselves put it: “We might end up in a world where the first AGI is developed by a non-cooperative actor, which is likely to be a bad outcome.”
But new polling shows that American voters aren’t buying it.
The details: A recent poll conducted by the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute (AIPI) — and first published by Time — found that Americans would rather fall behind in that global race than skimp on regulation.
  • 75% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats said that “taking a careful controlled approach” to AI — namely by curtailing the release of tools that could be leveraged by foreign adversaries against the U.S. — is preferable to “moving forward on AI as fast as possible to be the first country to get extremely powerful AI.”
  • A majority of voters are also in favor of the application of more stringent security measures at the labs and companies developing this tech.
The polling additionally found that 50% of voters surveyed think the U.S. should use its position in the AI race to prevent other countries from building powerful AI systems by enforcing “safety restrictions and aggressive testing requirements.”
Only 23% of Americans polled believe that the U.S. should eschew regulation in favor of being the first to build a more powerful AI.
  • “What I perceive from the polling is that stopping AI development is not seen as an option,” Daniel Colson, the executive director of the AIPI, told Time. “But giving industry free rein is also seen as risky. And so there’s the desire for some third way.”
  • “And when we present that in the polling — that third path, mitigated AI development with guardrails — is the one that people overwhelmingly want.”
This comes as federal regulatory efforts in the U.S. remain stalled, with the focus shifting to uneven state-by-state regulation.
Previous polling from the AIPI has found that a vast majority of Americans want AI to be regulated and wish the tech sector would slow down on AI; they don’t trust tech companies to self-regulate.
Colson has told me in the past that the American public is hyper-focused on security, safety and risk mitigation; polling published in May found that “66% of U.S. voters believe AI policy should prioritize keeping the tech out of the hands of bad actors, rather than providing the benefits of AI to all.”
Underpinning all of this is a layer of hype and an incongruity of definition. It is not clear what “extremely powerful” AI means, or how it would be different from current systems.
Unless artificial general intelligence is achieved (and agreed upon in some consensus definition by the scientific community), I’m not sure how you measure “more powerful” systems. As current systems go, “more powerful” doesn’t mean much more than predicting the next word at slightly greater speeds.
  • Aggressive testing and safety restrictions are a great idea, as is risk mitigation.
  • However, I think it remains important for regulators and constituents alike to be aware of what risks they want mitigated. Is the focus on mitigating the risk of a hypothetical superintelligence, or is it on mitigating the reality of algorithmic bias, hallucination, environmental damage, etc.?
Do people want development to slow down, or deployment?
To once again call back Helen Toner’s comment of a few weeks: how is AI affecting your life, and how do you want it to affect your life?
Regulating a hypothetical is going to be next to impossible. But if we establish the proper levels of regulation to address the issues at play today, we’ll be in a better position to handle that hypothetical if it ever does come to pass.
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Artificial Intelligence

Character AI sued following teen suicide

Published on October 28, 2024

By

Ian Krietzberg
The last person 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III spoke to before he shot himself wasn’t a person at all.
It was an AI chatbot that, in the last months of his life, had become his closest companion.
Sewell was using Character AI, one of the most popular personal AI platforms out there. The basic pitch is that users can design and interact with “characters,” powered by large language models (LLMs) and intended to mirror, for instance, famous characters from film and book franchises.
In this case, Sewell was speaking with Daenerys Targaryen (or Dany), one of the leads from Game of Thrones. According to a New York Times report, Sewell knew that Dany’s responses weren’t real, but he developed an emotional attachment to the bot, anyway.
One of their last conversations, according to the Times, went like this:
Sewell: I think about killing myself sometimes

Daenerys Targaryen: My eyes narrow. My face hardens. My voice is a dangerous whisper. And why the hell would you do something like that?

Sewell: So I can be free

Daenerys Targaryen: … free from what?

Sewell: From the world. From myself

Daenerys Targaryen: Don’t talk like that. I won’t let you hurt yourself, or leave me. I would die if I lost you.

Sewell: I smile Then maybe we can die together and be free together
On the night he died, Sewell told the chatbot he loved her and would come home to her soon.
Dany: Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

Sewell: What if I told you I could come home right now?

Dany: … please do, my sweet king.
This is not the first time chatbots have been involved in suicide.
In 2023, a Belgian man died by suicide — similar to Sewell — following weeks of increasing isolation as he grew closer to a Chai chatbot, which then encouraged him to end his life.
Megan Garcia, Sewell’s mother, hopes it will be the last time. She filed a lawsuit against Character AI, its founders and parent company Google on Wednesday, accusing them of knowingly designing and marketing an anthropomorphized, “predatory” chatbot that caused the death of her son.
“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in a statement. “Our family has been devastated by this tragedy, but I’m speaking out to warn families of the dangers of deceptive, addictive AI technology and demand accountability from Character.AI, its founders and Google.”
The lawsuit — which you can read here — accuses the company of “anthropomorphizing by design.” This is something we’ve talked about a lot, here; the majority of chatbots out there are very blatantly designed to make users think they’re, at least, human-like. They use personal pronouns and are designed to appear to think before responding.
While these may be minor examples, they build a foundation for people, especially children, to misapply human attributes to unfeeling, unthinking algorithms. This was termed the “Eliza effect” in the 1960s.
  • According to the lawsuit, “Defendants know that minors are more susceptible to such designs, in part because minors’ brains’ undeveloped frontal lobe and relative lack of experience. Defendants have sought to capitalize on this to convince customers that chatbots are real, which increases engagement and produces more valuable data for Defendants.”
  • The suit reveals screenshots that show that Sewell had interacted with a “therapist” character that has engaged in more than 27 million chats with users in total, adding: “Practicing a health profession without a license is illegal and particularly dangerous for children.”
Garcia is suing for several counts of liability, negligence and the intentional infliction of emotional distress, among other things.
Character at the same time published a blog responding to the tragedy, saying that it has added new safety features. These include revised disclaimers on every chat that the chatbot isn’t a real person, in addition to popups with mental health resources in response to certain phrases.
In a statement, Character AI said it was “heartbroken” by Sewell’s death, and directed me to their blog post.
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
The suit does not claim that the chatbot encouraged Sewell to commit suicide. I view it more so as a reckoning with the anthropomorphized chatbots that have been born of an era of unregulated social media, and that are further incentivized for user engagement at any cost.
There were other factors at play here — for instance, Sewell’s mental health issues and his access to a gun — but the harm that can be caused by a misimpression of what AI actually is seems very clear, especially for young kids. This is a good example of what researchers mean when they emphasize the presence of active harms, as opposed to hypothetical risks.
  • Sherry Turkle, the founding director of MIT’s Initiative on Technology and Self, ties it all together quite well in the following: “Technology dazzles but erodes our emotional capacities. Then, it presents itself as a solution to the problems it created.”
  • When the U.S. declared loneliness an epidemic, “Facebook … was quick to say that for the old, for the socially isolated, and for children who needed more attention, generative AI technology would step up as a cure for loneliness. It was presented as companionship on demand.”
“Artificial intimacy programs use the same large language models as the generative AI programs that help us create business plans and find the best restaurants in Tulsa. They scrape the internet so that the next thing they say stands the greatest chance of pleasing their user.”
We are witnessing and grappling with a very raw crisis of humanity. Smartphones and social media set the stage.
More technology is not the cure.
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Artificial Intelligence

A Frisson of Fission: Why Nuclear Power Won’t Replace Natural Gas as North America’s Critical Fuel

Published on October 27, 2024

By

From the C2C Journal

By Gwyn Morgan
The recent collapse of the power grid in Cuba, plunging the island nation into darkness and grinding its meagre economy to a halt, served as a reminder of electricity’s centrality to modern civilization. That dependency is only expected to increase as more electric vehicles take to the road – and, writes Gwyn Morgan, as the tech sector’s voracious appetite for electrons expands unabated. Morgan pours a pail of cold water on the much-mooted “nuclear revival” that has yet to deliver any actual new electricity. He argues instead that what’s needed is clear-eyed recognition that the most reliable, most abundant, most flexible and most affordable energy source is a fossil fuel located in vast quantities right beneath North Americans’ feet.
Three Mile Island: now there’s a name only us retired folk will remember. On March 28, 1979 the Unit 2 reactor in the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Middletown, Pennsylvania incurred a partial melt-down. This was and remains the most serious accident in U.S. nuclear power-plant operating history. Although nobody was killed or injured, the near-catastrophe gripped Americans for months (that was when the term “melt-down” entered the public lexicon). It further energized the powerful anti-nuclear movement – eerily, the movie The China Syndrome concerning a fictional reactor melt-down had been released just 12 days before the actual Three Mile Island event – and shifted public opinion further against generating electricity by splitting the atom. Construction of new facilities slowed dramatically and eventually the number of cancellations – 120 – exceeded the approximately 90 nuclear plants that actually operate; not one was built for 30 years.

Now, 45 years later, comes announcement of a deal by tech giant Microsoft Corporation with Constellation Energy, owner of the infamous Three Mile Island facility, to restart the mothballed nuclear plant’s sister reactor, Unit 1. It will be the first such restart in the U.S.

Nuclear revival? Forty-five years after the infamous partial reactor core melt-down at Three Mile Island (pictured at top left and centre) and release of the sensationalistic anti-nuclear movie The China Syndrome (starring Jane Fonda, pictured at bottom left), the plant’s sister reactor is set for a US$1.6 billion restart to power data centres supporting artificial intelligence (AI). Shown at top right, Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff during Three Mile Island crisis; bottom right, U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s motorcade leaves Three Mile Island nuclear power station. (Sources of photos: (top left) zoso8203, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (top centre) AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster; (top right) NRCgov, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; (bottom left) Everett Collection/The Canadian Press; (bottom right)  NRCgov, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

After all these years, why now? The answer is electricity demand for artificial intelligence (AI). Like many things in the tech realm, AI is a sneakily prodigious consumer of electricity, and AI’s use is exploding. The Microsoft/Constellation project is one of several such deals recently unveiled by tech giants.

A Goldman Sachs report from May of this year illuminates the issue, observing that, “On average, a ChatGPT query needs 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search.” ChatGPT is a popular AI tool for information research and content creation (college kids particularly love it); a related and even more power-hungry tool spits out sophisticated digital imagery. And ChatGPT is only one of the burgeoning AI applications, which include everything from order processing and customer fulfillment to global shipping, generating sales leads, and helping operate factories and ports. Consequently, says Goldman Sachs, “Our researchers estimate data center power demand will grow 160% by 2030” – representing a remarkable one-third of all growth in U.S. electricity demand. “This increased demand will help drive the kind of electricity growth that hasn’t been seen in a generation,” says the report, which it pegs at a robust 2.4 percent per year during this period.

Power-hungry tech: The rise of AI tools like ChatGPT is forecast to increase power demand from data centres by 160 percent over the next six years, part of a robust expected increase in overall electricity consumption. Shown at bottom, Google data centre for the company’s Gemini AI platform. (Sources of photos: (top) Ju Jae-young/Shutterstock; (bottom) Google)

That’s a lot of juice. So where will all this additional power come from? In the U.S., 60 percent of electricity comes from natural gas and coal. Nuclear energy supplies 19 percent, hydroelectric facilities 6 percent, while wind and solar provide the remaining 14 percent. But wind and solar are intermittent, difficult to scale quickly, geographically limited – and, above all, cannot be counted on for the large-scale, uninterrupted, secure “base load” that AI requires.

The small modular reactor – a digital rendering of which is shown here – is said to offer great potential for adding nuclear power in manageable increments; the technology remains in testing, however, and is unlikely to hit the ground in Western Canada before 2034. (Source of image: OPG)

And while there is something of a nuclear revival happening in the U.S. and around the world, it will be four years before Three Mile Island comes back on-stream (at an anticipated cost of US$1.6 billion). Such a time-frame even to restart an existing facility underscores the long lead times afflicting the design, construction and commissioning of any technically complex, large-scale and politically controversial infrastructure. There’s a lot of talk about shortening that cycle by focusing on a new generation of “small modular reactors” (SMR), which generate about one-quarter the power of the regular kind. But SMRs remain largely untested and, here too, their lead times are long. Alberta and Saskatchewan, for example, have been talking with other provinces for the last four years about the concept, but haven’t even begun writing the governing regulations, let alone holding public hearings. The most optimistic scenario has the first SMR coming online in 2034.

Realistically, then, most of the growth in power demand for AI will have to be met by fossil fuels, however distasteful this will be to America’s tech moguls, who want to be seen as hip and earth-friendly even if not all of them are actually left-leaning. (A laughable detail of the recent Constellation/Microsoft deal is that Three Mile Island is being renamed the “Crane Clean Energy Center”, as if it’s some kind of Google-style campus.)

Canada’s growing electricity demand, much of it driven by AI and other tech requirements, will also need to be fuelled by natural gas. Fortunately, Canada too has enormous untapped natural gas reserves, and is also setting new production records.

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Those tech moguls will have to come to terms with natural gas. Natural gas is by far the lowest-emission fossil fuel. It is readily transportable by pipeline around North America. Large-scale gas-fired generating facilities can be built quickly, at reasonable cost and at low risk using mature technology, and can be located almost anywhere. And, fortunately for Americans, natural gas is in robust supply, with production setting new records nearly every year, and is currently cheaper than dirt. Indeed, the Goldman report itself forecasts (too conservatively, in my view) that the growth in electricity demand will in turn trigger “3.3 billion cubic feet per day of new natural gas demand by 2030, which will require new pipeline capacity to be built.”

In Canada, 60 percent of our electricity comes from hydro power, but very few viable new dam sites are left (Quebec recently commissioned a new dam after years of delay, and does have a few additional candidate sites, but these are the rare exceptions). Ontario’s nuclear plants supply 16 percent. Expansion of this is under consideration but, as noted, any new capacity is many years away. Coal and coke supply 8 percent (and are being further scaled back), natural gas 8 percent, and solar and wind 6 percent. So Canada’s growing electricity demand, much of it driven by AI and other tech requirements, will also need to be fuelled by natural gas. Fortunately, Canada too has enormous untapped natural gas reserves, and is also setting new production records.

Plentiful, flexible, transportable, cheap: The lowest-emission fossil fuel, natural gas offers the best way to meet growing global energy demand, representing an enormous export opportunity for Canada and the U.S. Shown at top left, Freeport LNG Liquefaction facility, Freeport, Texas; top right, LNG Canada project under construction in Kitimat, B.C. (Sources: (top left photo) Freeport LNG; (top right photo) The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck; (graph) Canadian Energy Regulator)

In contrast to the United States and Canada, Europe is struggling just to meet existing electricity demand after natural gas imports from Russia dropped from 5.5 trillion cubic feet in 2021 to 2.2 trillion cubic feet last year. Europe’s only option is importing liquefied natural gas (LNG). Germany, previously the largest importer of Russian gas – and which in the face of the resulting energy shortage chose to shut down the last of its nuclear plants – is constructing LNG import/regasification terminals on an urgent basis. Regrettably, the situation could get even worse for Europe; China is in talks with Russia that could lead to complete stoppage of remaining gas flows, further escalating Europe’s need for LNG.

After spending a year of assessment, management concluded that AI was key to the company’s future. Thomson Reuters pledged to spend US$100 million annually to develop its AI capacity. Knowing that this is the cost for just one medium-sized Canadian company puts into perspective the potential scale of AI’s electricity-hungry global growth.

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That makes meeting the electricity demands of the EU’s smaller but also growing AI sector even more challenging. Moreover, Europe’s power grid is the oldest in the world at 50 years, so it needs both modernization and expansion. The above-quoted Goldman Sachs report states that, “Europe needs $1 trillion [in new investment] to prepare its power grid for AI.” Goldman’s researchers estimate that the continent’s power demand could grow by at least 40 percent in the next ten years, requiring investment of US$861 billion in electricity generation on top of the even higher amount to replace those old transmission systems. The situation is complex and challenging, but one thing is clear: the electricity Europe requires for AI can be fuelled in large part only by natural gas imported from friendly countries.

The AI frenzy may still seem incomprehensible to most Canadians, so it’s important to understand how its applications are spreading through more and more of the economy. Toronto-based Thomson Reuters is a well-known company that provides data and information to professionals across three main industries: legal, tax & accounting, and news & media. A recent Globe and Mail article about Thomson Reuters’ journey from reticence to embrace of the AI world provides helpful perspective. After spending a year of assessment, management concluded that AI was key to the company’s future. Thomson Reuters pledged to spend US$100 million annually to develop its AI capacity. Knowing that this is the cost for just one medium-sized Canadian company puts into perspective the potential scale of AI’s electricity-hungry global growth.

More juice needed: As many more companies – like Toronto-based information conglomerate Thomson Reuters – come to understand the need to embrace AI technology, the global appetite for electricity will continue to grow, demand that will only increase with the further advancement of cryptocurrencies and electric vehicles. (Sources of photos: (left) The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg; (right) Shutterstock)

Almost forgotten in the electricity-devouring list are cryptocurrencies. In 2020-21 Bitcoin “mining” (the data centres that compete to solve the encrypted blockchains as quickly as possible) consumed more electricity than the 230 million people of Pakistan. Meeting the tech sector’s voracious and – if the growth forecasts are accurate – essentially insatiable demand for electricity will be challenging enough, but there’s another major source of electricity demand growth: electric vehicles (EVs). An International Energy Agency report estimates that EV power needs in the U.S. and Europe will rise from less than 1 percent of electricity demand today to 14 percent in 2030 if electric vehicle mandates are to be met. This C2C article examines the specific implications for Canada.

Who could have imagined that these celebrated new technologies – billed as clean, green and “sustainable” – would end up being the biggest drivers of fossil fuel growth! With our incredible endowment of accessible natural resources, our nation should seize this enormous natural gas export opportunity by getting rid of the bureaucratic time-consuming processes and other roadblocks that have so long discouraged getting new LNG export terminals built and operating.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.

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