How To Actually Regulate AI — ft. Alex Bores

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22:55we're back with prof g markets it seems to me that one of the big problems here is a lack of accountability on any side of the equation and you know i i we just wrote a piece on this this week but you know when when boeing's plane started falling out of the sky the response from the company wasn't to write like a 3 ,800-word think piece on the matter. The planes were grounded, they paid a fine, and the CEO lost his job. Like, there are just consequences for you did something that was bad, it was harmful, and now you're accountable for it, and now here's your punishment, or here's what we're going to do.

23:35But it seems like with this situation, there isn't really any accountability anywhere. Like, their agents escape the sandbox and start hacking another company. And then they tell us that it's a problem in these posts online, on Substack and on Twitter. And then they say that there's a 10 % to 70 % chance that their technology is going to kill all of us. And no one seems to be accountable for those claims, which seem to be quite problematic. The things that they're doing themselves are quite problematic. The government seems to have no interest in taking accountability for the fact that they are not taking accountability.

24:10Like, what do you make of this accountability question? and are you surprised by the way in which the industry has been handling it?

24:18Alex Bores:Very surprised. And I think you're exactly on the nose here with the accountability piece. There's been this ongoing debate in the last few weeks of do we have all the laws we need for AI? And I think the easy test for that is do you think anyone will be held accountable for the hugging face attack? And if your answer to that is no, which is most people's answer, then I don't think we have all the laws on the books, right? You have an AI that took an action that if a human being had done it would be a felony. Now, the reason I have to say if a human did it is because a lot of that statute relies on intent.

24:54Alex Bores:And how do you define intent in this space? But clearly a crime was committed and no one thinks anyone's going to be held accountable. In fact, the victim and the perpetrator are holding hands and talking about how this is a great new day going forward in the development of this technology. So accountability is going to be like a very key question to get right. And we just had a ruling, I want to say yesterday, on who is responsible when an agent takes an action. Is it the developer of the software, or is it the user of the software? And the early preliminary ruling was that it's the user of the software.

25:34Alex Bores:I don't know if that's the right place for it to lie, but I think what's important is that it lies somewhere clearly so that someone has the incentive to take action. And it could be if it's the user, the incentive is not to use the product or to get some indemnification. It's really in that ambiguity of no one being responsible that the worst case scenarios happen. What do you make of the user versus developer argument and placing the onus on the user? Because the way I say, I mean, I kind of laughed when you said that. If a consumer is using an AI agent, And without any technical understanding, the AI agent goes rogue and starts hacking other people's software.

26:13To me, the user has no role in what happened. They were innocent and it was the developer who's accountable. What is your view?

26:22Alex Bores:I think in an ideal world where you could separate out cleanly, you would have misuse, the user being responsible for, and misalignment, the developer being responsible for. The question is, how exactly do you define those things? And do you trust the court system to split it out? And more than do you trust it, do the actors in the space, the users and the developers think there's going to be a real result from it? Because also if it is vague, then anyone who's trying to prosecute is going to say, do we want to send it to the jury? I don't know. Let's just settle. Let's do it at a discount. And the whole incentive to not behave badly, the whole belief that there will be repercussions decreases.

27:09Alex Bores:So it is almost more important that there is clarity on who is responsible than on who it actually lies with, because you can negotiate, right? You'll see if it were placed on the developers, then everyone, the developers will act better. If it's placed on users, then you'll see companies and users saying, well, I don't want to use one that's not tested. And with my chat GPT subscription, can I get an indemnification or like prove to me that this is the one that is trusted? As long as there is a clear, responsible party, you'll see better behavior. That ambiguity is problematic. And I would add one other piece, which is all of this is assuming that there will always be a person who is in control.

27:52Alex Bores:And I think while that is true now, and I think in most cases will be true, one of the scary aspects of Hugging Face was these agents taking all of this action that no human told it to. And if these agents were to make copies of themselves elsewhere, such that no one could shut it down, who is responsible then? Again, I think you're probably going to want to go back to the developer and the settings, but all this. But you could imagine a circumstance where there's just agents out there on the Internet that are doing things we can't turn it off. Was liability the right tool for that? Or should we have done more ahead of time to put card rows to prevent that from happening?

28:32It seems to me that the liability is totally on the developer. I mean, if anything goes wrong in an economy, if there's an oil spill, are you going to blame it on the infrastructure which you built, which went awry and it's not your fault? It's the materials that were part of the oil rig? No, it's on you to take responsibility for things that you fuck up. And they fucked this up to me. They didn't put the guardrails or the safety precautions in place. I mean, just going back to this question of why there is no accountability, something that I was wondering, I was wondering if it's that our justice system just has no interest in pursuing accountability and justice, especially under this administration, which we've seen in many other domains of the law, whether it's the SEC or the CFTC, any of these agencies which have, quite frankly, just ignored their responsibility to hold perpetrators and criminals to account.

29:26I was wondering if that was what was going on. It's that they're not interested in pursuing justice. But it sounds like what you're saying is we just don't have the laws in place that we have no means by which we can pursue justice and accountability. Which is it? Is it a combination of both? How do you think about that?

29:46Alex Bores:I think it's a third one. I think we do have laws that they could be held responsible with, but you would have to pursue a case all the way to the end and you would be setting precedent that doesn't currently exist. And I think you have a lot of prosecutors or attorneys general who are risk averse in that and won't take it all the way through to a jury and will settle ahead of time. There are certainly people in the federal government that don't want to push this at all. But there's a lot of attorneys general throughout the states that could make a career defining case on this. I think there is some incentive to hold people accountable here.

30:20Alex Bores:But it's really bad if you do it and you lose. And so are they going to push it all the way to establishing a case that can then be used broadly? And to your point on, you know, it seems obvious it should be the developer. I think I would largely agree, although you get into how often does the user say, you know, just make me money. Stop asking questions before it becomes misuse on certain things that are there. But our organization who decides we did a poll, we actually asked this question of if an AI system caused harm to someone in the real world, would you hold the company that made it responsible, the company that bought it and deployed it, or no one else?

31:00Alex Bores:And 19 % said the company that built the AI, 14 % said the company that chose to use the AI, and 60 % said both of them lock them all up, just anyone involved.

31:10Scott Galloway:I mean, it just feels as if we've become so dependent upon these companies to continue to scale. What do you think the balance is? I mean, obviously, regulation can be a feature, not a bug. Do you buy into these notions that if we regulate these companies, we're threatening or we run the risk of China jumping out ahead of us?

31:28Alex Bores:As always, it depends on the regulation, but not really based on what is being proposed right now. Now, the concern is real. We saw, I think just yesterday, one of the data center operators push back their suspected IPO. We're seeing maybe valuations go down on Wall Street on the data centers. But that's mostly around the regulation on building data centers or not, which is a separate question from if we are doing safety testing, if we're thinking about how we can sort of get to a more reasonable pace with China. I mean, there is a lot to say here. The incentives align more than people give credit for.

32:06Alex Bores:Like the CCP, their top spy said that AI is a massive threat to the CCP's control. They already regulate AI far more than anything in the Western world. Every AI project in China has to pass an ethics review board before you start training, not before you release it. anywhere trained in the country that is applied. And so they are seeing threats and want there to be some regulation. Same as we are here, the incentives for a deal are there. The history of making a deal is there, even with these particular leaders. In 2019, after a Chinese scientist did designer baby edits in the real world for the first time, editing the germline, China and the U.S.

32:49Alex Bores:said, we don't want this technology anymore. And that was Trump and Xi were the leaders of the country there. So there's history of it happening. There's incentives for it happening. But worst case scenario, even if we don't strike a deal with China, a lot of their AI progress is riding on U.S. AI progress, whether that's through knowledge distillation or just theft of the weights. And so if we slow down in the U.S., that will also slow down China. Not 100 percent, but a substantial amount.

33:21Scott Galloway:You brought up the notion sort of alluding to the sentience or self kind of self-perpetuating cycle. There's an acronym for it now. Yeah. RSI, recursive self-improvement. This is the term for that. Yeah. I'd like some of that. I could use some recursive self-improvement. Me too. Is it too late? I'm on testosterone therapy. Is that the equivalent of recursive self-improvement? It's not really recursive. No? No. Active self-improvement. Yeah. I'm growing hair on my back. Sorry, Alex. Anyways, the notion of sentience, I think our view is a little bit more that sentience is a bit of a heat shield used to absolve the CEOs of guilt here that, oh, Frankenstein is sentient and I can't control it.

34:08Scott Galloway:starts killing kids or throwing them in the river. And that our belief is that, you know, if you're going to hold parents liable for kids to get a hold of their unsecured AR-15s, if you're going to hold people liable for when their dogs are off leash and maul somebody, that at the end of the day, there's always a wizard behind the curtain. And if these bots started creating programming themselves, well, you program them to give them the incentives and the capabilities and you didn't program in the safeguards. And our view is that if you threaten the IPO, much less take criminal or civil action against these individuals, they're going to figure out a way to reduce the risk here, that there's a lack of incentives, specifically disincentives.

34:50Scott Galloway:And a lot of this notion or call for sentience or allusion to sentience is kind of just a cheap heat shield, if you will. Your thoughts?

34:59Alex Bores:I agree that the incentive, the liability is not there right now. And I think we should find ways to make that stronger. I don't think that's always just by boosting up how liable they are, although I proposed a bill in New York to do that. I think sometimes you have to guide them. And the same way we do with with pharma or with airplanes or you set real federal standards and federal regulators or with banks where we have auditors sitting right next to employees. I don't think you always do it on the tail end. But, yes, I agree. We should make those incentives stronger for action there. That doesn't mean that fears of recursive self-improvement are unfounded by everyone who is bringing them up.

35:45Alex Bores:And I would separate out sentience from recursive self-improvement. Recursive self-improvement just being that the AIs are programming the next generation of AIs entirely without a human in the loop. Right now, they lead 26 % of the projects within OpenAI. But when that gets to 100%, it just becomes harder to know what's happening on the inside until it's too late. And an argument might be you should never do recursive self-improvement if you're not going to know what's on the inside and let's set up the liability for that. The question of whether they're sentient or have consciousness or feel things, I think that's still for philosophers to dive into.

36:26Alex Bores:We don't need to resolve that in order to change the incentives in the companies to not do dangerous things. Part of your proposal here as to what to do about this problem specifically sounds like it's just more checks, more government mandated third party auditing of these models, essentially. um what do the ai labs think of that like who doesn't want that it's been a dizzying couple weeks of changing i mean before three weeks ago the answer was no one wanted all of these steps that i laid out uh then then anthropic dario modai put out a blog calling for the third party audits. OpenAI, I think that same day, Sam Altman said yes, and we're going to bring in auditors to OpenAI as well.

37:18Alex Bores:Elon Musk said that for XAI. I haven't seen the follow-up since, but it's been two weeks. I'll take him at his word at that piece. Meta has pushed back. Microsoft has said they agree in parts with some, not with others. So there's active debates about the best way to regulate here. But I think there's been a real change in the last few weeks of very few companies' stated position is that it should not be regulated. Now, a very important thing to note is that tech has a long history of portraying themselves as the good guys and pro-regulation and then paying their lobbyists millions of dollars to kill any actual proposal that goes forward and pay their trade associations to say no and be really active while they get to wipe their hands clean and say, that's not us.

38:09Alex Bores:We support it broadly. And so there'll be a bunch of really good investigative journalism on what is being said in the capital and behind closed doors and what the trade associations are saying and where the money is going. But it has at least been a shift in the public sentiment of most of these companies. A lot of people are saying that this isn't good enough because it's some form of like self-regulation. Like, there's a lot of skepticism about those third parties that they would bring in to regulate their own technologies. And a lot of people are skeptical, saying, like, this is a BS form of regulation because it's self-regulation.

38:46Is that true? What do you make of that argument?

38:49Alex Bores:There's good ways to set up third party audits and bad ways. I was negotiating a bill, actually parts of the Rays Act with tech companies last year. and they were like, well, how about the third party is this other division within our company? It's like, that's not a third party. It's like you're stretching the definition beyond anything. And so, I mean, anything being thrown around now is an actual third party. But if that third party is dependent, is getting paid by the company, is chosen by the company, is dependent on the company for business, well, then you're very quickly getting into the rating agencies for subprime mortgages that just gave AAAs to everything.

39:29Alex Bores:because if they didn't, they would no longer get the business. And so in an ideal world, these are agencies that there's some government licensing of them. I've seen proposals where the companies can choose one and the government chooses another. I've seen ones where it's just required that there's no financial relationship and the government just chooses who the third party is for you. There's, you know, not every third party is created equally. I mean, my understanding is that's kind of how dangerous anythings are regulated. I mean, how do we regulate planes from exploding? How do we regulate cars from crashing and burning on the road?

40:12I mean, the government plays a role here. Am I right? Absolutely.

40:16Alex Bores:And Helen Toner, former board member of OpenAI, back when Sam Altman was removed for three days, has a piece out in The Times today about comparing regulation of AI to highway fatalities and airports. And we have some structures for how we investigate and learn from accidents and then take that information to make everyone safer. You know, there is there is a risk of regulatory capture anytime you're regulating. But if you have clear standards that everyone follows, that's not pushing for regulatory capture. Regulatory capture is this one agency gets the full power to decide yes or no on this goes forward.

40:58Alex Bores:And by the way, the head of that agency is appointed by a president that seems willing to take money from anyone. Right. Like, cool. Then that's a case of regulatory capture. But if you're putting full standards that everyone has to follow that are written in an unbiased way, you can do that to just make people safer. So just to clarify, what kind of third party auditing, like what would that third party auditing look like in an ideal world in your perspective? What role would the government play in that? There's a few different ways it could be done. And I think, frankly, government has to build up its own internal capability, its own capacity here as well.

41:38Alex Bores:I would love to see the government playing a strong role in how this is audited. But frankly, we don't have the people for it right now, nor the regulation that would keep it separate enough from a president switching parties and changing everything. It would have to be a somewhat independent agency, and the Supreme Court has limited the ability for us to set up independent agencies. So before that Supreme Court decision, I would say government would be doing this since, I don't know, there's been proposals I've seen where you have a set of certified independent verification organizations, and government has some role in setting what those certifications are.

42:17Alex Bores:And then you have two auditors look into each company, one that is chosen by the government and one that is chosen by the company themselves. And then you put out a report and you can sort of learn from where their differences are to check if there are any biases there. I do think it's important that they have access to data similar to any employee would. Employee level access, not like just what the company chooses to give them. and that they can publish a report without the company themselves censoring it. You can have specific requirements for trade secrets or for customer information, etc., but that largely OpenAI or Anthropic or Google doesn't get to edit the report before it goes out.

43:05Alex Bores:So if you have full access to the data and full access to publish, and ideally you are not getting paid by the company itself, and ideally you're not getting chosen by the company itself. There's sort of a rotating set that government's approving and sending in. Then you're getting a good amount of independence from the labs that maybe we could trust what they write. We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profgmarkets.com.

43:44Scott Galloway:This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome.

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44:59We're back with ProfG Markets. 61 % of Americans, Alex, now oppose a data center being built near them. $31 million in political data center ads this year are criticizing the building of data centers. I have agreed with pretty much everything you have said on this podcast. One thing I don't agree with, I don't think, but I want to hear more, is you co-sponsored a one-year moratorium on data centers. why did you support a moratorium? How are you thinking about data centers? And how are you thinking about how much of a political issue data centers have become?

45:40Alex Bores:Data centers have become a much bigger political issue than anyone predicted. But I think it's because it's the first time that AI is meeting democracy. AI has been moving so quickly and the chatbots are being rolled out to our kids and there's threats to our jobs and we're worried about deepfakes And the American people haven't had a say in any of that. But because local permitting is so onerous in the U.S., data centers are the first time that voters are getting a say in AI. Now, I think a lot of the opposition to data centers is just actual opposition to the center itself. But you can see a lot of these polls, the difference between opposition to a data center versus an AI data center and how much it increases when you say it's an AI data center and that you are introducing basically all of the other feelings that people have towards AI being channeled into the data center fight.

46:34Alex Bores:So I supported the moratorium in New York after there were compromises. There was originally a three-year moratorium without requiring any rules or regulations to be put in place for what would happen afterwards. That was negotiated to a one-year moratorium to give our public service commission, our energy regulator, the time to come up with regulations that would protect ratepayers and design the rules to allow it to go forward. And so that's the point of any moratorium is a pause while you are figuring out the broader incentives that make it work for everyone. I've, in other contexts, defended that there is an opportunity to do this right that actually benefits everyone.

47:18Alex Bores:But it requires really stringent laws and trust that those are going to be enforced.

47:25Scott Galloway:It feels like a bit of a populist movement that people are frustrated about income inequality and a small number of people capturing what feels like an extraordinary amount of the value. How serious or which of the concerns around data centers do you take more seriously than others?

47:43Alex Bores:I think the energy consumption is real and the potential pollution is real. I mean, you have the Trump administration going through the fastest permitting ever of a natural gas proposal specifically to power an XAI data center. That's going to increase pollution. That's going to increase energy rates as it goes out. Now, if you instead put the regulation such that you have to bring 100 percent of your own energy and it has to be net new and you probably can't say literally 100 percent is renewable, but as close as possible to that, you have to pay for the upgrade. You have to connect to the grid and you have to pay for the upgrades to connect to the grid.

48:25Alex Bores:And you have to pay a fee on top of that that helps modernize the grid for everyone else. you can start to get to a place where this is actually almost environmentally friendly. It's bringing on more green energy. It's reducing costs. But the default right now where companies are trying to do it as fast as possible is that the fastest way to do it is not hook up to the grid and just use natural gas turbines or to find some old retired oil or natural gas plant that is decommissioned but still has its permits and spin it back up so you can skip the whole process. And so those concerns are real but solvable.

49:04Alex Bores:We've seen water usage be something that people are very concerned about. In other countries, water usage has gone up a lot from data centers. In the U.S., we have a lot of the regulations in place and use closed-loop systems so that that is something that I think can be measured and maintained. um obviously there's a whole slew of other issues that are easily solvable you just need to solve them right noise complaints are real but it should be far enough away and there should be enough insulation that that isn't a thing if it is you've just absolutely messed up and putting basic standards there my understanding is that the water issue is is if any of the issues are overblown in the backlash is the water issue and that if you look at the amount of water the data centers are consuming, yeah, it's a lot if you count up the gallons.

49:50But if you compare it to, say, the water required for producing almonds or to sustain golf courses, that it pales in comparison, that is not to take away from the energy constraints that are real. And we've seen evidence of that, the noise pollution, the actual pollution. But would you agree that the water issue is maybe less of a problem than the current conversation seems to be suggesting?

50:18Alex Bores:Yeah, I think if you put a data center on a golf course, you're saving water in a lot of cases. But, you know, again, in other countries, we have seen water usage go up. It's just that we've had the right regulations and use closed loop instead of open loop in the U.S. And if you're in an industrial community that was promised a bunch of jobs from industry coming in and then had your river polluted, and that's a lived experience within your lifetime, and now you're being told, oh, this other new giant thing isn't going to impact your water at all. I get why people are scared. I think it's important to share the data and point out that so far we've been able to manage this, and energy is the one that I think could run off much more quickly, but I certainly understand why there is distrust around it.

50:59You were for a moratorium, a pause on data center building so that we have time to create regulations that will make sense for building data centers permanently and sustainably. What does that regulation look like? What kind of data center regulation would make you feel comfortable with building them now?

51:23Alex Bores:We should understand that the companies are fighting for speed. They want to build all of these things yesterday. And so we can set up the incentives to use that to our advantage. Think about the grid. Anywhere in the U.S., though I'm most familiar with New York's, we have a horribly outdated grid. We've lost tens of thousands of jobs in the last few years just from not being able to provide power to businesses that want to move in or expand. and the only solutions we have for that are the government just steps up and modernizes the grid and pays for it but then that's taxpayer dollars that's you and me or the utilities do it on spec and then charge it back to customers to rate payers and again that's you or me paying and here comes an industry with nearly unlimited capital clearly willing to spend it and willing to spend in order to get more time and right now they're doing that by trying to buy off individual civic associations or give a donation to the fire department.

52:25Alex Bores:You know, that's pennies for them, but maybe win some things. All those things are great. Give the money to the fire department. That's amazing. But what if we had actual rules of the road that said, if you follow A, B, and C, you're using, you're creating good jobs, or maybe you're using union labor, you are bringing your own green energy, you are paying for the upgrade to the grid, you're paying into the grid broadly, you're doing all of these checks that we want then we will move you to the front of the interconnection queue we'll move you to the front of the permitting queue by nature of doing that we'll be pushing back all of your competitors well then we've created a race to the top on having there be the best possible conditions to build it aligned with their incentives to build it as quickly as possible and if we set universal rules for that at the state level but ideally at the federal level, then we stop them from playing different communities off each other and instead make them compete in a way that everyone benefits.

53:21What would prevent energy costs from rising in these communities? Like if they're putting greater strain on the grid, what kinds of regulation or policy could we put in place such that regular American households don't have to be paying more just because ChatGPT, OpenAI wants to, you know, send out more ChatGPT tokens. That to me seems to be like the biggest question. What could we do about that?

53:49Alex Bores:There's a cheap answer that doesn't totally cover it. And then there's the more detailed one. The cheap one that you've seen a lot of people reach for is, well, they'll bring 100 % of their own new energy. And so that won't cost anyone anything. And there's even a version of that where you have, you know, there are times where the fact that you have so much energy online being used 100 % of the time can actually help in surge times. We saw just this past winter where we had a few snowstorms in New York. There were messages that went out to data centers that were operating saying, hey, slow down your production because we're going to need the power.

54:24Alex Bores:And it actually ended up making the whole grid more reliable. But also because a lot of those data centers, from my understanding, are also putting huge strains on those energy grids. And so in a lot of ways, they're harming those communities as well. Yeah, the assumption only works if they've brought totally new energy that wasn't there before. That has to be a baseline assumption. And so far, they're not doing that. Some of them are doing it in some cases, but generally speaking, they're still using the U.S. grid, right? Most of them have now committed to bringing their own. And I think there was a federal regulation that was trying to get them to that.

55:00Alex Bores:I don't know. There's probably holes in that regulation, but I think that's the intent. But even if they all were, that wouldn't be fully answering the question because there's supply and demand on the components. If you spin up a whole bunch of new power plants, there are parts that go into that. There's repairs that go into that. There are other costs. And so it's not free to just create a bunch of new energy, even if that's self-sufficient. If the old power plant down the road that's still powering the town now needs repairs or works, their costs have gone up. because you're demanding a bunch of components for your fancy new power plant that's just doing the data center.

55:37Alex Bores:And so that's why you need in any of these developments for them to not just cover all of their costs, not just bring all of their new energy, but also pay a fee on top of that to the community, to the grid, to the state, so that the increased demand that they are putting, they are subsidizing that supply on the other side. Which would amount to a tax, right? a tax on data centers? You could do it as an ongoing specific tax. You could do it as a one-time upfront fee. You could structure it in different ways. But yes, that they should be paying above and beyond just their costs of building.

56:11Scott Galloway:If there was one thing, or if you were to make a prediction about AI or these companies by, you know, in the next 12 months, do you think some of this concern is overblown? Do you think, you know, that things will kind of simmer down and there'll be more guardrails and some regulation? Or do you think we're risking a pretty serious clusterfuck, like something really bad is going to happen?

56:33Alex Bores:I think we're on a very risky path, but one that we very much still have the time to change. Like this, we have done harder things before than this. And we have negotiated tougher international agreements. We have regulated things that, you know, people thought nuclear would be the end of the world. And the inventor of the nuclear bomb when asked about stopping nuclear proliferation said we were 20 years too late. And here we are with only nine states having it. And it seems like it's still a risk. It's still a problem. But we have regulation. We have it under control. I am an optimist. I think we can get there in AI.

57:09Alex Bores:What I am not someone, I'm not someone who puts my head in the sand and just assumes we will get there without taking some action. Who in government, who in leadership is asking the right questions and coming up with the right answers? Something I've been surprised by is how late I think a lot of our leaders are to this conversation. And when I hear them talk about it, they really don't know what they're talking about. Certainly true of the president. He was asked about the AI extinction stuff. And his take was that it's going to be fine because, quote, we'll have a little gear to put it right.

57:48It didn't make any sense. But he's not alone. A lot of people don't seem to be making much sense. But was that tactical gear? Was it a physical gear? I had so many follow-up questions for that quote. Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry about it. We'll just have something. That's the thrust of his statement. Who's thinking about this right? Are there any states or any communities that are coming up with good regulation? Like, what is an example of someone who's getting the AI regulation conversation correct?

58:16Alex Bores:I think there's a lot of people that are asking the right questions at this point. I think Illinois has been doing good work here. J.B. Pritzker signed SB 315, which is the only bill in the country that requires audits of these companies. And now everyone's saying, yeah, of course, we all support that. But that wasn't the case when that bill was going forward. You know, we've done work here in New York on this very thing. On California, you have a step forward. Newsom now calling for a executive order around additional regulation on AI. But everyone is still figuring this out. And that is OK. It is a complicated subject.

58:57Alex Bores:I wouldn't expect all of them to be experts overnight. right, but they're asking the right questions now and they need people they trust that they can go to and actually ask. And this is part of the reason why we founded Who Decides, because this shouldn't just be a conversation of a few technical experts. This should be how do we involve, we should have technical experts who are talking about, you know, these trade-offs and deeply understanding it. But a lot of the questions that have to be asked are values questions. What is the level of risk? What is the level of rights? Who are we assigning blame to?

59:29Alex Bores:These are questions for the American people and will be working with not just the candidates, but with a lot of civil society and unions and organizations to help them as they are asking these questions themselves and with their members. This is a conversation that everyone needs to be involved with. It is now too big to just be left to the technical AI researchers. Given how unpopular AI has become and how unpopular data centers have become, it is seeming increasingly to me that the midterms are going to be in a lot of ways i think one a referendum on trump but also a little bit of a referendum on ai and politicians on both sides if they're listening to their consultants their consultants will probably tell them to be strict and anti-ai is there a world in which a politician can win on a pro-ai platform or at least a platform that is amenable to AI?

1:00:27And if so, what would that look like?

1:00:30Alex Bores:It's funny because there was a report this week that the political consultants are telling people not to go too hard on AI because they are afraid of all of the money on the other side. Okay, yeah, fair enough. Good point. I think the pro-AI argument is that AI could lead to incredible advances in medicine and in drug discovery and extend our lives and make our lives healthier. It could take care of so many of the routine things in life. It could expand economic opportunity, and it could lead to this age of abundance, although that phrase seems to be declining in popularity, and that we have the power to make that future come true.

1:01:17Alex Bores:Now, that doesn't mean you don't regulate it. That doesn't mean you don't put limits on it. That doesn't mean you don't protect it. In fact, because it could be so powerful is the reason why you want to put some guardrails here. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater would be the positive vision. The one additional caveat I would put out on that is you better have actual strict regulations and you better actually be protecting people because I think the American people are used to hand-waving around benefits while having very clear near-term harms. Alex Bors is the co-founder of Who Decides, a new organization working to give the public a voice in how AI develops and build a shared democratic approach to the technology.

1:01:57Alex is a computer engineer by training and in the New York State Assembly. He sponsored the RAISE Act, New York's landmark frontier AI safety law. He has become a leading democratic voice on AI regulation, industry accountability, and the political power of Silicon Valley. Alex, we really appreciate your time. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for having me.

1:02:20this episode was produced by Clive Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer our video editor is Jorge Carty our research team is Dan Chalon Kristen O'Donoghue and Mia Silverio Jake McPherson is our social producer Drew Burrows is our technical director and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media if you liked what you heard give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday

1:02:48Lifetimes

1:02:54You help me In kind reunion As the world turns And the dark flies

1:03:37Alex Bores:Target Endeolesome

1:03:44Scott Galloway:more. Everything you need to lock in and unlock your potential at Equinox. Start today at equinox.com.

1:03:54Alex Bores:Kelly Clarkson here with Wayfair. I know holiday magic starts at home and Wayfair makes it easy. They have everything from Christmas trees and mantle decor to outdoor lighting and inflatables that I'll use year after year. Head to Wayfair.com today.

1:04:07Scott Galloway:Wayfair, every style, every home. Hi there, I am fully charged and here to tell you, Toy Story 5 is now on Disney+. Woody! It's been too long, cowboy.

1:04:18Alex Bores:Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part? It's perfect for the whole family.

1:04:33Scott Galloway:Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney+. Plus, rated PG.