Gov. Pritzker: AI is dangerous 'on the level of nuclear ...

JB Pritzker has looked at the artificial intelligence industry and reached for the nuclear comparison, which is at least bolder than the "transformative technology" boilerplate that gets faxed out of every conference panel. "Dangerous on the level of nuclear weapons," the Illinois governor told ABC News, while urging Congress to pass federal guardrails — a body that has spent the last two years demonstrating it can be relied upon to do precisely nothing on this file. One admires the ambition. One also notes that nuclear weapons arrive with an entire architecture of treaties, inspections and people whose actual job is saying no, and that nobody is building that here.

"Look, we passed something" is the great state-level comfort, and in July Pritzker signed Illinois legislation requiring AI companies to conduct annual third-party audits of their safety plans and to disclose safety incidents to the state. Annual, third-party, safety plans: three words doing the work of about four paragraphs of enforcement that never quite arrive. The company writes its own safety plan, hires the third party, pays the invoice, and files the incident disclosure in Springfield, where it joins a filing cabinet and a press release. It is homework with a receipt.

And the tell, delivered without apparent irony, is that Pritzker does not support Bernie Sanders' proposal to ban superintelligence — because in this debate everyone is a regulator right up until regulation might actually stop something. He wants Congress to pass guardrails while the White House stands in front of the gold rush with both arms wide, which leaves state governors as the last line of defence, and state governors have brought stationery. Nuclear-grade danger, state-level paperwork. Still, fair play to the man: he said the quiet part at a volume Washington can hear, and given that the alternative on the table is a Sanders ban, the labs should be sending him a fruit basket.