Sanctimonious Rage Will Not Get Us Good AI Regulation

And we need good AI regulation

This popped up on my timeline yesterday:

If 2014 me could see that tweet, he would be crushed. That version of me — who was jazzed to my fingertips to be writing for TV — thought I was at the beginning of some grand crusade of enlightenment. It turns out that I was actually working on a project that would eventually invoke dread in smart people similar to what you feel when someone at a party takes out a guitar, or when your Uber driver starts talking about Israel. The lesson — I think — is that if you ever think something good has happened to you, you’re wrong.

Much of social media reacted negatively to the piece, so I watched it. It was about how chatbots can contribute to delusion and even abet suicide, and it contained all of the selective anecdotes, misrepresentations, and omitting of context that I’ve come to expect from the show. But the thing that floored me was this joke:

Holy fucking shit — my former boss just joked that he’d like to see four tech leaders killed in a maritime accident! And the audience applauded…yyyyyyyyyikes! This is the first time I’ve said this in my 20-year comedy career, but: Where the fuck were the lawyers? They cleared that? I once had a joke on that very TV show killed because it was “insensitive to Florida,” and now “Haha, those people should drown, like those other five people recently did,” gets waved through? I’ve written some fucked up jokes in my time, but I don’t think I’ve ever written a joke quite that fucked up.

And apparently, John thinks that death is not sufficient punishment for makers of AI. He ended the piece by calling back a joke about a “Satan” chatbot, and he made it clear that he thinks that certain tech leaders are going to hell.