2023 is the year governments around the world awaken to the threat posed by artificial intelligence

By Dr. Jim Castagnera, Esq.

Partner, Portum Group International

As a college professor and freelance journalist, I’ve watched and commented on the successive crises of the first quarter of the 21st century.  The new millennium had hardly begun, when the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon set off the “War on Terror.”  What were intended --- at least publicly --- by the Bush Administration to be brief surgical strikes into Afghanistan and Iraq turned into America’s longest brushfire wars.  In fairness to “W” and his team, it must be said that a lot of bad people --- most notably Osama bin Laden --- were hunted down and killed, while the United States suffered no comparable recurrence of 9/11.

The “War on Terror” consumed the first two decades of our new century.  Arguably, it officially ended when Joe Biden pulled the last American forces out of Afghanistan between April and September 2021.  I suspect some god or demon is charged with maintaining the proper quotient of human misery.  No sooner were our troops out of Afghanistan than Putin rekindled the Cold War by invading neighboring Ukraine.  And in case that wasn’t trouble enough, an international pandemic spanned the first few years of this third decade, disrupting normal human activities in unprecedented ways.  The effects of this disruption continue to be felt today.

While escalating Western --- and especially American --- support for Ukraine poses the real possibility of the war spilling into other countries, for now at least it’s just part of the daily news cycle.

As such, it’s been eclipsed by ChatGPT.  Just as for the preceding three years my publishers and webinar providers couldn’t get enough different angles on COVID-19 --- most recently the “Return to Work” angle --- now all my freelance clients are clamoring for ChatGPT stories and webinars.  In fact, this afternoon I’ll be presenting a webinar entitled “Revolutionize Your HR Practices with Chat GPT: A Technical Webinar for HR Professionals.”  And I just published a piece headlined, “Hollywood’s Script Writers v. ChatGPT: Is No

Occupation Safe Anymore?” [https://hr.cch.com/ELD/LaborPulse052223.pdf]

Folks traditionally poke fun at the sector where I practiced my chosen profession --- Academia --- by noting how slowly higher education seems to adapt to change.  That’s sometimes a fair criticism and sometimes not.  Truth is, we in the academy are nowhere near as slow as our counterparts in government.  My current nightstand reading is a book called Troublesome Young Men, which tells the story of how the anti-appeasers in the British Parliament finally woke their government up to the Nazi threat.

It took the Trump Administration most of 2020 to realize, and finally admit, that COVID-19 was a real pandemic, killing real Americans.

As the title of this Blog says, 2023 is the year when governments around the world are finally awakening to the threats posed by Artificial Intelligence. 

These threats aren’t new.  For decades, American manufacturers have been gleefully offshoring their factories, while also introducing robotics as rapidly as the profit-motive dictated.  Not satisfied with robotic plants, the entrepreneurs and techies have moved hand-in-hand into the transportation industry and other service sectors.  Blue-collar Americans, robbed of their well-paid assembly line jobs, and forced to make a living as so-called “gig workers,” now face the threat of being replaced even in those lesser occupations by self-driving cars and delivery bots.

But none of the above is why governments are now paying attention to AI.  No, it was the emergence of ChatGPT last November that finally woke lawmakers up.  For the first time in our history, we “symbolic analysts” --- as Prof./U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich awkwardly dubbed us in The Work of Nations 30 years ago --- are threatened by AI.  As my piece on the Hollywood writers’ strike, cited above, points out, for the first time in history AI can do what we thought only we humans could do.

The timing of this Blog is inspired by an article published by Reuters this morning: “Factbox: Governments race to regulate AI.” [https://www.reuters.com/technology/governments-efforts-regulate-ai-tools-2023-04-12/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=060223]

From Australia to the United States --- in alphabetical order --- including the EU and the G7, the article ticks off the legislative and regulatory initiatives aimed at reining in AI.  A companion piece spotlights Japanese initiatives: “Japan privacy watchdog warns ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on user data.” [https://www.reuters.com/technology/japan-privacy-watchdog-warns-chatgpt-maker-openai-data-collection-2023-06-02/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_campaign=Daily-Briefing&utm_term=060223]

 Privacy, as this Blog has pointed out in previous installments, likewise has come into its own on the coattails of ChatGPT this year.  But privacy is just the AI iceberg’s tip.  What will sink the Titanic of homo sapiens’s dominance on planet Earth will be the so-called “Singularity.”  That’s the moment in time when a progeny of ChatGPT is our intellectual equal.  All signs indicate that moment may be only a few years, at most a decade, away.

So, when my colleagues in law firms and HR departments wax lyrically about how ChatGPT is making their work faster and easier --- the topic of next week’s Blog --- I try to warn them that it may be themselves whom they are making obsolete.

Stay tuned…

And meanwhile, please register for my June 20 Assent Global webinar on “How to Write a ChatGPT Policy for Your Employees.” [https://assentglobal.us/webinar/3106/How-to-Write-a-ChatGPT-Policy-for-Your-Employees]

Hope to have you there.