Senators Press For National Artificial Intelligence Strategy
Several U.S. senators have proposed the Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act to create a national AI strategy and fund federal R&D in this growing area to the tune of $2.2 billion. The initiative’s $2.2 billion would be awarded over a five-year period to multiple federal agencies. At the same time, although the European Commission put out guidelines for artificial intelligence technology, some experts are saying that the tech companies that participated in drafting guidelines compromised them to protect their own interests.
VentureBeat reports that the Act, created by senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) and Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), would fund agencies such as the Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and would also “establish a National AI Coordination Office to lead federal AI efforts, require the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study the effects of AI on society and education, and allocate $40 million a year to NIST to create AI evaluation standards.”
Wired reports that Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz philosopher Thomas Metzinger criticized the European Commission’s AI guidelines saying that, “too many of the experts who created [them] came from or were aligned with industry interests.” He and another group member drafted a list of prohibited AI uses, including autonomous weapons, but “tech’s allies later convinced the broader group that it shouldn’t draw any ‘red lines’ around uses of AI.” In the formal draft, “red lines” became “critical concerns,” which “appeared to please Microsoft.”
Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler also believes that, “industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence … becoming too influential over how society governs and scrutinizes the effects of AI.”
Signs of pushback include San Francisco’s ban of the city’s use of facial recognition and the Algorithmic Accountability Act, introduced by senators Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and representative Yvette Clarke (D-New York), to require companies to “assess whether AI systems and their training data have built-in biases, or could harm consumers through discrimination.”
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