During Sunday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s “Life, Liberty & Levin,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) rejected calls for a moratorium on artificial intelligence (AI) and vowed to put the proper guidelines in place.
“Look, our Democrat socialists are crazy,” he said. “You know that and I know that. A lot of the same crowd is in favor of boys in girls’ locker rooms. These are the folks that are supportive of transgender surgery for our kids. I mean, they’re — look, they’re off-the-wall crazy. It’s one of the biggest concerns we’ve got here, is these folks can’t control Congress. Now, they still can have a voice; they can still yell and scream. And believe me, our liberal press is going to give them an opportunity to stand on the soapbox. But there are reasonable individuals within Congress, House and Senate, that recognize number one, we’ve got to stay ahead of the game. Number two, Xi Jinping is not foolish. He is directing the Chinese military to do everything they can to not only catch up, but to exceed us when it comes to military applications, not just in air, land, and sea, but in cyberspace and in space, and they are moving at breakneck speeds. We have to stay ahead of them.”
He continued, “And these guys, I’m sorry, but these folks out here that are calling for moratoriums and so forth, there’s no way we can do moratoriums on this. But we can provide the American people with assurances that we’ll have guidelines in place, and not only guidelines in place, but we also can establish what we call sandboxes where we actually have oversight, and we make the rest of the artificial intelligence community look at each one of these frontier models and help to develop the sandbox that keeps them away from the internet. Those are important items, otherwise, China is going to continue on, and we’re going to sit back here and wonder what happened to our future and AI is a part of it. We’ve got to do it right. And look, I’m not interested in subsidizing it. These folks are smart. Free enterprise always works better, and they’re making money and they’re reinvesting it right back into developing new and more powerful programs. But look, you are absolutely correct. I’m happy to hear that you’ve done the homework you have. China is the real deal, and they are moving at breakneck speeds.”
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