TOKYO, July 22, 2023—President Joe Biden’s July 21 announcement that seven top American A.I. Companies had agreed to voluntary safeguards on the technology’s R&D is a classic U.S. policy on government regulations – that the government, or bureaucracy, almost always trails behind business development.
Will the Artificial Intelligence Seven – Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI – actually agree to Biden is an open question as they fiercely compete with each other for supremacy to make their technology a global standard There’s also competition law questions.
Chances are that whichever among them prevail, its AI technology would be adopted for government contracts on defense, intelligence and many other administrative undertakings in a de factor industry-government collaboration that is dominated by business initiatives, with government, or bureaucracy, subserviently checking to see legality and ethical compliances.
This basic hands-off policy toward businesses (though self-explanatory and nothing new and repetitive) is how the U.S. thrives on inventions and advanced technology.
The case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who was the chief developer of atomic bombs of that was dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, can be traced as a classic example in which Washington asked the scientist to pursue the Manhattan Project with government money, representing a democracy paradigm.
Europe is in quite different dimensions: Being in principle an autocratic continent, bureaucracy leads in many walks of European human activities (the U.K. might be an exception) including business and technology through government interventions applied before and after actual private-sector developments.
Adolf Hitler instructed the development of the Volkswagen (Beetle) for military use in Germany’s extremely frigid winter climate, so the vehicle’s engine was air-cooled. He also ordered building the Autobahn high-speed highway network for moving military vehicles fast and efficiently, the road concept conceived during the mid-1920s Weimar Republic era.
In the post-World War II period, Europe had led the work of reorganizing the previous European standardization regime as the International Organization for Standards (ISO) under the aegis of the United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee (UNSCC), giving ISO the UN recognition as the world standards regime. The ISO, based in Geneva, Switzerland, has historically been made up of European representatives on its board.
ISO, with its European influence, has effectively nullified the Japanese standards such as the Japan Industrial Standard (JIS) and Japan Agricultural Standard (JAS) that Japan sought to sell to Asian countries and ultimately around the wolds during Japan’s 1980s-90s GoGo era, making the two standards obsolete even in Japan. The Japanese could not understand that even though ISO was promoting its standards as private-sector rules, they were actually managed by European autocracy. During intense discussions on various ISO technical committees at that period, the United States had kept a neutral stance because the U.S. federal government hardly had national standards laws and regulations.
So the bureaucracy administrative differences continue existing to this day!
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