Bill Maher on the Midterms, AI Worldwide, the Future of Free Trade

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Fareed Zakaria (1:40)

This is GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria.

Today on the program, the US midterm elections are less than a month away. Are we watching the end of Trump and MAGA?

Do the Democrats deserve to win? I'll talk to the ever opinionated political satirist, Bill Maher.

Also, Biden's Middle East envoy, Brett McGurk, on the state of the Middle East, three years after the October 7th attacks.

Then, the World Bank president, the Prime Minister of Greece, on whether AI will steal your job.

And a surprising optimistic message from the head of the World Trade Organization.

But first, here's my take. It strikes me as bizarre that today in the United States, a new pill to treat heartburn would have to go through months or even years of government approvals and testing before being released to the public. But the most powerful technology ever developed, capable of breaking into banks, shutting down power grids, or helping build bioweapons, can be released without even a preliminary government review.

We're having a collective failure of imagination about artificial intelligence. While many closest to the technology have issued grave warnings and urged oversight, it doesn't register as a major public concern. Congress has of course so far abdicated its role as a lawmaker, and the Trump administration is delighted to let the industry regulate itself. President Trump is right that the term artificial intelligence doesn't capture the phenomenon. It is superintelligence, analytic capacity greater than that of any human, and perhaps even large collections of the smartest humans. We reach for analogies, the industrial revolution, electricity, the Internet. But electricity does not get exponentially smarter every six months. The Internet cannot solve mathematical problems, diagnose diseases, or design new weapons.

Bad people can use these superpowers for bad purposes, but that's not the scariest scenario. We have seen models hack into databases and computer systems while pursuing unrelated goals. Suddenly, the old thought experiment about an AI told to maximize paperclip production, which then proceeds to commandeer all the world's energy and resources maniacally to make more paperclips, seems a little less fanciful. The danger is not that the machine becomes evil. It is that it becomes massively and unpredictably destructive while pursuing its legitimate goal.

You cannot self-regulate. If one AI lab spends six months testing a powerful model while its competitors release theirs, prudence will carry a commercial penalty. The companies themselves understand this. Read the calls issued over the last two years by researchers and top executives at almost all the leading AI companies and they warn of a race to the bottom in which everyone might prefer greater safety, but no one can afford to slow down first. That is a classic collective action problem and precisely what regulation is designed to solve. For a start, many of the voluntary safeguards the industry has proposed could simply be turned into mandatory ones. But what about China? The argument that US regulations will simply let China win starts with a premise. China is not racing ahead without rules. Beijing already regulates powerful AI systems requiring security assessments and restricting how models are developed and deployed. Nor does history suggest that technological competition must mean abandoning safety. During the Cold War, the US was locked in an existential nuclear race with the Soviet Union. Yet we required civilian reactors to be licensed and meet federal safety standards. In fact, the Soviets were the ones with a weak safety culture and inadequate oversight, which produced the Chernobyl disaster. After it, Washington and Moscow actually expanded cooperation on nuclear safety, recognizing that some risks transcend national rivalry. The fiercer the competition and the more consequential the technology, the more important it becomes to establish some rules for the race.