Artificial Intelligence in the United States
Benefits and risks of Artificial Intelligence
After years of steady but slow progress on making computers “smarter” at everyday tasks, a series of breakthroughs in the research community and industry have recently spurred momentum and investment in the development of this field.
Today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn’t anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, Artificial Intelligence’s influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition. In healthcare, the President’s Precision Medicine Initiative and the Cancer Moonshot will rely on Artificial Intelligence to find patterns in medical data and, ultimately, to help doctors diagnose diseases and suggest treatments to improve patient care and health outcomes.
In education, Artificial Intelligence has the potential to help teachers customize instruction for each student’s needs. And, of course, AI plays a key role in self-driving vehicles, which have the potential to save thousands of lives, as well as in unmanned aircraft systems, which may transform global transportation, logistics systems, and countless industries over the coming decades.
Like any transformative technology, however, artificial intelligence carries some risk and presents complex policy challenges along several dimensions, from jobs and the economy to safety and regulatory questions. For example, Artificial Intelligence will create new jobs while phasing out some old ones—magnifying the importance of programs like TechHire that are preparing our workforce with the skills to get ahead in today’s economy, and tomorrow’s. Artificial Intelligence systems can also behave in surprising ways, and we’re increasingly relying on AI to advise decisions and operate physical and virtual machinery—adding to the challenge of predicting and controlling how complex technologies will behave.
There are tremendous opportunities and an array of considerations across the Federal Government in privacy, security, regulation, law, and research and development to be taken into account when effectively integrating this technology into both government and private-sector activities.
Federal Efforts
The Federal Government is working to leverage AI for public good and toward a more effective government. A new National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence meet for the first time in May 2016. This group monitors state-of-the-art advances and technology milestones in artificial intelligence and machine learning within the Federal Government, in the private sector, and internationally; and help coordinate Federal activity in this space.
National Science and Technology Council group worked to increase the use of AI and machine learning to improve the delivery of government services. Such efforts included empowering Federal departments and agencies to run pilot projects evaluating new AI-driven approaches and government investment in research on how to use AI to make government services more effective. Applications in Artificial Intelligence to areas of government that are not traditionally technology-focused are especially significant; there is tremendous potential in AI-driven improvements to programs and delivery of services that help make everyday life better for Americans in areas related to urban systems and smart cities, mental and physical health, social welfare, criminal justice, the environment, and much more.
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