The chief executives of some of the largest tech companies in the U.S. will meet at the Capitol next month to discuss the future of artificial intelligence and how it should be regulated in the future.

The bipartisan meeting has been organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. On his invite list are Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, Google LLC’s Sundar Pichai, Meta Platform Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg, Nvidia Corp.’s Jensen Huang, Sam Altman of OpenAI LP and Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp. Next to this Who’s Who of Big Tech bosses will be representatives from advocacy, civil rights, worker and creative groups.

Schumer intends to use the technical nous of these CEOs to create “AI Insight Forums.” His hope is to achieve a wider understanding of AI so that senators are able to legislate it in its various forms. Basic AI has been around for many decades, but it’s after the recent boom in generative AI models that pressure has been on politicians to rein it in before it creates social problems.

At the moment, AI lives in the wild frontier. That may be good for development but may have negative effects on society down the line. Earlier this year, a Goldman Sachs report stated that AI will replace 300 million workers over the next decade. This is one reason why various intellectuals and technologists have called on the government to stall the development of AI before it’s too late.

There’s also the issue of misinformation. You only need to take a few minutes using Open AI’s ChatGPT to understand in response to some serious questions it quite often pumps out reams of factual-sounding nonsense. How would that work with issues of the day, such as the last pandemic, when the truth was, at times, a work in progress?

Moreover, thousands of authors whose works are currently being plagiarized by AI are now demanding “consent, credit or compensation.” Lastly, there’s the rather important question of whether AI will head in a direction that will destroy humanity, as has been ventured by various people, including the physicist Stephen Hawking and Musk himself.

It seems Europe – no surprise there – is already on the ball in regard to regulating AI. The EU recently announced the “AI Act” to deal with many issues stated above, including surveillance. The surveillance issue is also something that has caused waves in the U.S. over the last few years.

Then again, there are those who are calling for the government not to put the brakes on AI development so fast, such as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Andreessen is a proponent of the belief that AI will save the world, and that the U.S. should get ahead of countries such as China.

So these meetings in Washington, starting Sept. 13, could be pivotal in regard to the future of the U.S. It’s not that senators haven’t already spoken with tech leaders about the rise of AI systems; They have, but they certainly will need a better understanding if they are to implement new laws. They should be interesting meetings, given that these tech leaders in the past have disagreed on various aspects of AI and how it fits into the future of society.

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