The Right and Wrong Way to Regulate Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has a lot of prominent people shaken up. Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others worry AI programs and AI-enabled robots might replace humans in their jobs before the economy can adapt, or worse run amok in Terminator-like apocalyptic scenarios. Entrepreneur and Singularity University founder Peter Diamandis is worried about the opposite situation. He fears the field of artificial intelligence could be stifled by rules the way stem cell research was under Republican President George W. Bush, who in 2001 announced a block on federal funding for new stem lines. "It had the experience of really putting the kibosh on that kind of work," Diamandis tells Inc. "One of of the things I think is very true and important for people to realize is that you can't regulate against technologies. If an individual is working in AI or biotechnology or whatever the case might be, and you say'that's way too dangerous, we need to slow this down, we're going to put hurdles and regulations in front of it here in the United States'... All that means is that technologies leave the U.S.," Diamandis said in a phone interview.