Top Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies have been lobbying for the technology’s regulation. One of these companies’ a license to distribute. This raises the questions of how AI can be regulated, and whether or not it should be.
First and foremost, requiring a license to sell or distribute AI is not a good idea economically. This would prevent new competition in the market, making the technology worse for everyone. Competition is what sparks innovation in products, like TVs. If nobody competed with the original TV, it would have taken us far longer to move past CRTs and into flat-screens. This isn’t just true for TVs, though. Many of the products we use today would take far longer to develop to their current stage.
Just because a license shouldn’t be required doesn’t mean Artificial Intelligence shouldn’t be regulated, however. If AI remains unregulated it will continue to take jobs and impersonate people. While it is inevitable that some jobs will get replaced with AI, it is important to place limits on these replacements so that humans can still work and earn money.
One of the best ways to regulate AI is to place restrictions on what corporations can do with the technology. For example, companies could be restricted to only having a percentage of employees as AI. Copyright law could also be modified so that anything created using AI can not be copyrighted.
Government regulation of Artificial Intelligence is a good thing and should happen, but it needs to happen in the right way. Requiring a license would do nothing except stifle competition, making the product worse in the long run, and not regulating it at all will just continue taking jobs, eventually making the bubble will pop, and the economy will crash.
