Californians Say AI Is Moving ‘Too Fast’

Hello and welcome to Tuesday's episode. In a loop. I am writing to you looking out over the sunny city of San Francisco, where I am spending a week on a reporting trip. If you're working on something cool here and want to say hi, shoot me an email: [email protected].

What you need to know: Californians are afraid of AI

Californians are more concerned than excited about the future of artificial intelligence, by a margin of 55% to 33%, according to a new poll shared exclusively with TIME ahead of its release Tuesday. Of the 1,400 adults surveyed, 48% said technology was moving “too fast,” compared with 32% who said the pace was “about right” and just 4% who said it was “too slow.” 59% of respondents said they think AI will benefit the wealthiest corporations and households the most, compared with 20% who said it will benefit workers and the middle class the most. The survey was funded by the progressive nonprofit TechEquity.

Regulatory support – New data shows that 70% of Californians believe in the need for “tough laws to make AI fair.” But the data also shows high levels of skepticism that these laws will ever pass. 59% of respondents said they do not believe the California state government can control AI. Even more, 64%, said they do not trust the federal government.

A picture emerges “The survey adds to a growing body of data from around the world showing that ordinary people are concerned about the impact of AI on their lives. In January I wrote about Great Britain. vote It showed that 60% of Britons favor a ban on the development of “smarter than human” artificial intelligence models. And in April, the Pew Research Center found that 43% of US adults believe AI is more likely to harm them than benefit them, compared with 24% who expected the benefits to outweigh the harm.

Epicenter — California is emerging as a key battleground for AI legislation, as it is the state where most of America's leading AI companies are based. Last year check a bill aimed at regulating so-called “border” models was approved by the state Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. However, this has not stopped other efforts to regulate AI in the state. California “is a place where you can still legislate and govern through a semi-functioning legislative process, which is not the case with the District of Columbia, especially on this topic,” says Catherine Bracey, CEO of TechEquity. “The federal government has made it clear that it will be completely hands-off unless it creates regulations that further liberate the industry,” Bracey says. “[So] The onus is on states to pick up the slack and make sure the real people who will be impacted by these tools are protected.”

Who to know: Dean Ball, former White House artificial intelligence adviser

This was unusually impressive for a tenure. Dean Ball joined the Trump administration in April and was brought in based on an essay he wrote called “Here's What I Think We Should Do” about AI policy. What followed was a tumultuous five months in government, during which he played a key role contributing to the AI ​​Action Plan, Trump's AI policy announced in July. Earlier this month, Ball announced he was leaving government to focus on his own research.

Action planning – Trump's action plan has won praise for its emphasis on bolstering the capacity of the U.S. energy grid, as well as locating data centers and producing the chips that power them. The document also calls on US companies to focus more on developing open weight AI models to prevent the world from relying on Chinese models (which are currently best in class). The document makes these and many other recommendations from the point of view of an escalating AI race with China.

Exit interview – In an interview with TIME, Ball emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence for the Trump administration. “AI is the president's number one technology policy priority by a significant margin,” he said. At the same time, Ball said there is great skepticism within the administration about the artificial intelligence industry's predictions that superintelligent machines will emerge in about two to five years. “AI will take a very long time to spread,” says Ball. “I've already lived through technological revolutions when I was young and clear-eyed and thought it would all happen in two or three years. And it turns out that a lot of it did happen, but it took 15 years.”

AI in Action: Should You Delete Old Emails to Save Water?

Official UK government documentThe post, published last week, sparked intense criticism online for suggesting users should “delete old emails and photos” to save water during droughts as data centers “require huge amounts of water to cool their systems.”

It's true that many data centers use water for cooling, but let's put it into perspective. Andy Masley, a blogger who has written several explanatory articles on energy and water consumption in artificial intelligence systems, provided the numbers. After fixing the leaking toilet, he wroteyou can save 200-400 liters of water per day.

“To save as much data center water as fixing your toilet would save, you would need to delete 1.5 billion photos or 200 billion emails. If it took you 0.1 second to delete each email and you deleted them non-stop for 16 hours a day, it would take you 723 years to delete enough emails to save the same amount of water in data centers as you could if you fixed your toilet. You might want to.” fix your toilet.”

As always, if you have an interesting story about artificial intelligence in action, we'd love to hear it. Write to us at: [email protected]

What we read

“The flirty chatbot Meta with artificial intelligence invited a pensioner to New York. He never made it home» Jeff Horwitz at Reuters