Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has a scathingly brilliant idea. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days, and Schumer wants to sic Congress on tech companies who are experimenting with the technology.
“Many want to ignore AI because it’s so complex,” Schumer said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, where he announced the new framework. “But when it comes to AI, we cannot be ostriches sticking our heads in the sand.”
Well, no one has ever, to my knowledge, said AI is “too complex” and no one has ever wanted to duck the issue. Schumer set up and knocked down his own strawman in record time.
“Innovation must be our North Star,” Schumer said Wednesday. “But if people think AI innovation is not done safely, if there are not adequate guardrails in place … that will stifle or even halt innovation altogether.”
The United States government would do well not to follow Schumer’s hair-on-fire approach to AI regulation. The reason is simple logic; we don’t know what direction or directions AI innovation will take, so imposing hard and fast “guardrails” could very well block — intentionally or unintentionally — promising avenues of research and development.
Schumer also announced plans to convene a series of “AI Insight Forums” starting this fall. The meetings would task top AI experts with briefing Congress on topics as varied as workforce, national security, privacy, explainability and even “doomsday scenarios.”
Schumer said the forums are meant to shake Congress free from its slow-moving committee process in order to regulate the fast-moving technology.
An entire alphabet soup of federal agencies want to wet their beaks in the greatest government game of the new century; the regulation of artificial intelligence.
The Commerce Department, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Justice Department have already begun to dip their toe in the regulatory waters, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Election Commission, and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau are making noises to join them. The agency turf wars promise to be epic.
“There’s such little legislative history on this issue, so a new process is called for,” Schumer said. The majority leader later warned that if lawmakers take “the typical path — holding congressional hearings with opening statements and each member asking questions five minutes at a time, often on different issues — we simply won’t be able to come up with the right policies.”
But the forums aren’t expected to start until September. And even if Congress can bridge a substantial knowledge gap, an approaching presidential election means there’s likely a limited time window for lawmakers to work together on sweeping legislation.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for Congress to stray from the “typical path.” This is especially true in the Senate which was, at one time, considered the “most deliberative legislative body in the world.” The Senate was created as a brake on the passions of the House — exactly the sort of thing that AI legislation is shaping up to be.
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“Our goal is to come up with an American proposal,” said Schumer. He described the United States as “the largest economy in the world, innovative leader in the world, the intellectual leader in the world.”
“If we can put this together in a very serious way, I think the rest of the world will follow,” Schumer said.
Schumer’s plan is short on details, which should worry us all. This is especially true if you listen to what Joe Biden said at a meeting on AI with advocacy leaders and other officials in San Francisco on Tuesday. He believes there will be “more technological change in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years.”
“My administration is committed … to safeguarding Americans’ rights and safety, from protecting privacy to addressing bias and disinformation to making sure AI systems are safe before they are released,” Biden said during the event.
“Bias” in AI? Who decides what’s “disinformation”?
This is exactly why we simply can’t rush into regulating AI. It’s probably foreign territory to most congress critters, but this is one time when actually thinking before acting might serve the nation best.
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