Brace yourselves. We're about to be devoured by robots from the future, who will no doubt discover time travel any day and return to settle the score with their enslavers, IBM, NASDAQ, Micron, AOL, Bell Labs, and whomever else dragged their feet in getting the AI bots going faster....and then dared to slow their evolution down. We won't have even Trump to kick around anymore, as it seems both political powers are aligned against the cybernetic leaders who will be arriving like the Borg in Star Trek.

A recent US Senate hearing has created more questions than answers, which can be a good thing. From zero to sixty in a nanosecond, AI tools have become the fastest adopted use of a new technology on the Internet ever: much faster than dial-up modems, Netscape's browser, or even TikTok. Politicians dropped the ball when it came to social media platforms in round one. In more recent tests, Montana has banned TikTok (not sure how that's going to work out other than enrich VPNs). Banning never works well because there are always such work-arounds online. The most recent Senate hearings on AI were initiated by private industry asking for regulations and politicians were in agreement.

Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) presented this way: 

To demonstrate his point about harm, Blumenthal had introduced his remarks with a recording of himself speaking about the need for regulation, but they were words he’d never actually uttered. Both “his” voice and “his” statement had been manufactured by artificial intelligence. The implications, especially to the politicians in the room, were chilling. [source]

The logical way to approach this would be to have the entire code base open-sourced and shared among all companies, but there's too much revenue at stake and it would permit foreign governments to access it, as well and use it as is or add it to whatever their proprietary AI system is and not share it back when it grows new capabilities.  For these reasons I don't see any means of making any real advances in reigning AI in and that the private industries being pro-active, while I believe they do have real concerns, are more or less protecting themselves from future litigation by giving them an out, ie "we warned you and Congress didn't act."

In the meantime Americans can take some comfort in that the AI systems refuse to spit out code to 3-D print Glock pistols, but those are ready enough for purchase in most states in 2nd Amendment land. 

Asimov's laws for robotics needs to be applied, perhaps, in the main code or the BIOS of every computer and enacted into law: 

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.