Tech companies are pushing the idea that the only way to make AI safe is to leave them in control. Trusting them could lead to disaster
This month, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, convened government representatives, AI companies and experts at Bletchley Park – the historic home of Allied code-breaking during the second world war – to discuss how the much-hyped technology can be deployed safely.
The summit has been rightly criticised on a number of grounds, including prioritising input from big tech over civil society voices, and fixating on far-fetched existential risks over tangible everyday harms. But the summit’s biggest failure – itself a direct result of those biases – was that it had nothing meaningful to say about reining in the dominant corporations that pose the biggest threat to our safety.
Georg Riekeles is associate director of the European Policy Centre, an independent thinktank based in Brussels. Max von Thun is director of Europe and transatlantic partnerships at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly thinktank
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