Trump rejects global entity for AI oversight
President Donald Trump condemned the idea of a global entity to oversee artificial intelligence in his remarks at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
He said the United States “rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI, just a day ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival at the White House for meetings, in which AI could be a major topic of discussion.
The president insisted in his remarks that the U.S. is leading the world in AI innovation and reiterated his argument that the technology’s disruptive or possibly dangerous capabilities are a “hoax.” It comes as Trump has warned that efforts to regulate AI could hamper American efforts and allow China to get ahead.
“We’re leading now over China by a lot and everyone else and we’re going to keep it that way. We’re going to keep it very, very straight and very strong. I’m not going to stifle growth of anything that’s going to be bigger than the industrial revolution,” Trump said. “We will be very careful and that’s why we have a Department of Justice.”
The president also said the name should be changed to “super intelligence,” calling on other nations to drop the use of “artificial.”
“It is not fake, it’s actually amazing,” the president said. “From this point forward, all United States documents and hopefully the world’s will be changed to use the much more accurate term, super, as opposed to artificial. So it’s super intelligence. In other words, welcome to the new world of super intelligence dash SI.”
On Monday, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, 22 nations adopted a declaration that artificial intelligence “must remain under human direction, oversight and control” and suggested creating a global supervisory regime. Finnish President Alexander Stubb, one of the organizers of the document, told POLITICO that he thinks “it will be in the interest of both China and the United States to have some kind of guardrails.”
