{"id":31681,"date":"2023-05-18T09:22:44","date_gmt":"2023-05-18T13:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/ai-government-regulation\/31681\/"},"modified":"2023-05-18T15:32:30","modified_gmt":"2023-05-18T13:32:30","slug":"ai-government-regulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.co.za\/blog\/ai-government-regulation\/31681\/","title":{"rendered":"Here’s how we should approach artificial intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit tired by now of all the AI news, but I guess I\u2019ll have to put up with it a bit longer, for it\u2019s sure to continue to be talked about non-stop for at least another year or two. Not that AI will then stop developing, of course; it\u2019s just that journalists, bloggers, TikTokers, Tweeters and other talking heads out there will eventually tire of the topic. But for now their zeal is fueled not only by the tech giants, but governments as well: the UK\u2019s planning on introducing three-way AI regulation<\/a>; China\u2019s put draft AI legislation up for a public debate<\/a>; the U.S. is calling for \u201calgorithmic accountability<\/a>\u201c; the EU is discussing but not yet passing draft laws<\/a> on AI, and so on and so forth. Lots of plans for the future, but, to date, the creation and use of AI systems haven\u2019t been limited in any way whatsoever; however, it looks like that\u2019s going to change soon.<\/p>\n

Plainly a debatable matter is, of course, the following: do we need government regulation of AI at all? If we do \u2014 why, and what should it look like?<\/p>\n

What to regulate<\/h2>\n

What is artificial intelligence? (No) thanks to marketing departments, the term\u2019s been used for lots of things \u2014 from the cutting-edge generative models like GPT-4<\/a>, to the simplest machine-learning systems, including some that have been around for decades. Remember \u04229<\/a> on push-button cellphones? Heard about automatic spam and malicious file classification<\/a>? Do you check out film recommendations on Netflix? All of those familiar technologies are based on machine learning (ML) algorithms, aka \u201cAI\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here at Kaspersky, we\u2019ve been using such technologies in our products for close on 20 years, always preferring to modestly refer to them as \u201cmachine learning\u201d \u2014 if only because \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d seems to call to most everyone\u2019s mind things like talking supercomputers<\/a> on spaceships<\/a> and other stuff<\/a> straight out of science fiction<\/a>. However, such talking-thinking computers and droids need to be fully capable of human-like thinking \u2014 to command artificial general intelligence<\/a> (AGI) or artificial superintelligence<\/a> (ASI), yet neither AGI nor ASI have been invented yet, and will hardly be so in the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

Anyway, if all the AI types are measured with the same yardstick and fully regulated, the whole IT industry and many related ones aren\u2019t going to fare well at all. For example, if we (Kaspersky) will ever be required to get the consent from all our training-set \u201cauthors\u201d, we, as an information security company, will find ourselves up against the wall. We learn from malware and spam, and feed the knowledge gained into our machine learning, while their authors tend to prefer to withhold their contact data (who knew?!). Moreover, considering that data has been collected and our algorithms have been trained for nearly 20 years now \u2014 \u00a0quite how far into the past would we be expected to go?<\/p>\n

Therefore, it\u2019s essential for lawmakers to listen, not to marketing folks, but to machine-learning\/AI industry experts and discuss potential regulation in a specific and focused manner: for example, possibly using multi-function systems trained on large volumes of open data, or high responsibility and risk level decision-making systems.<\/p>\n

And new AI applications will necessitate frequent revisions of regulations as they arise.<\/p>\n

Why regulate?<\/h2>\n

To be honest, I don\u2019t believe in a superintelligence-assisted Judgement Day within the next hundred years. But I do believe in a whole bunch of headaches from thoughtless use of the computer black box.<\/p>\n

As a reminder to those who haven\u2019t read our articles on both the splendor and misery of machine learning<\/a>, there are three main issues regarding any AI:<\/p>\n