To Regulate AI or Not? How should Governments React to the Artificial Intelligence Revolution? 60 Leaders

(e)  The interests of Americans who increasingly use, interact with, or purchase AI and AI-enabled products in their daily lives must be protected. Use of new technologies, such as AI, does not excuse organizations from their legal obligations, and hard-won consumer protections are more important than ever in moments of technological change. The Federal Government will enforce existing consumer protection laws and principles and enact appropriate safeguards against fraud, unintended bias, discrimination, infringements on privacy, and other harms from AI. Such protections are especially important in critical fields like healthcare, financial services, education, housing, law, and transportation, where mistakes by or misuse of AI could harm patients, cost consumers or small businesses, or jeopardize safety or rights. At the same time, my Administration will promote responsible uses of AI that protect consumers, raise the quality of goods and services, lower their prices, or expand selection and availability. (d)  Artificial Intelligence policies must be consistent with my Administration’s dedication to advancing equity and civil rights.

It would also allow us to figure out the limits of LLMs and direct their applications with those in mind. From the client side, the large number of relatively small contracts shows that the federal government is still very much in an experimental phase of purchasing AI and is likely looking for specific use cases where AI is appropriate. This would explain the focus on research-based contracts as opposed to hardware and software-based contracts. With a large number of small vendors each having a single contracts, we perceive that the government is adopting a strategy of letting a thousand flowers bloom, with the hope that this will lead to eventually figuring out the best approach to AI. It’s important to remember that, as companies find ways to use AI for competitive advantage, they’re also grappling with challenges.

MIT community members elected to the National Academy of Inventors for 2023

As organizations increase their use of artificial intelligence technologies within their operations, they’re reaping tangible benefits that are expected to deliver significant financial value. “The government had more faith in its flawed algorithm than in its own citizens, and the civil servants working on the files simply divested themselves of moral and legal responsibility by pointing to the algorithm,” says Nathalie Smuha, a technology legal scholar at KU Leuven, in Belgium. Here once again the current COVID-19 outbreak comes in our help, as it is often remarked that crisis – like wars – are always dramatic accelerators of change. So as discussed by Geoff Mulgan in a recent blog post,16

“Coronavirus could be used to accelerate changes that were long overdue” as it served as an extreme stress test for governments of all kinds and with specific impacts on digital resilience, institutional governance capacity and welfare systems. In March 2019, the Government’s Analysis, Assessment and Research Centre has published a policy brief on Finnish AI Competences (Finland Governemnt, 2019a), comparing how the country scores across the board. For the purpose of analysis, AI has been divided into ten subfields.14

Finland’s strongest publishing record happens to be in Platforms and services; Ecosystems; Robotics and machine autonomy; and Sensing and situation awareness.

The same goes for adoption of automated decision-making tools at the state and local levels. They’re used in law enforcement and the broader criminal legal cycle, in public benefit administration, in housing processes, and more. Certain states have pending legislation that would improve transparency and accountability of these tools state-wide, but none have passed yet. From Siri to Chat GPT, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way people plan their days, communicate with their friends and family, and more.

EPIC Comments: National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework

Governments at all levels are using AI and Automated decision-making systems to expand or replace law enforcement functions, assist in public benefit decisions, and intake public complaints and comments. Interested in building enterprise AI applications that facilitate public sector operations? Public-use technologies demand a higher level of accountability and compliance with regulations than technologies developed by the private sector. AI-based cognitive automation, such as rule-based systems, speech recognition, machine translation, and computer vision, can potentially automate government tasks at unprecedented speed, scale, and volume. A Governing magazine report found that 53% of local government officials cannot complete their work on time due to low operational efficiencies like manual paperwork, data collection, and reporting.

• (m)  The term “floating-point operation” means any mathematical operation or assignment involving floating-point numbers, which are a subset of the real numbers typically represented on computers by an integer of fixed precision scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base.
• By allowing a broad range of employees to experience generative AI’s potential, agencies stand to learn faster and address lingering worries about job security and satisfaction.
• The findings show that a majority of respondents are actively exploring the application of generative AI.
• This streamlines the decision-making process and leads to more effective and impactful policies.

Trooper Sanders, CEO of the nonprofit Benefits Data Trust, which advocates for streamlined access to government assistance, said while AI could help unwind some of the “administrative muck” present, leaders must not see it as a silver bullet. “At some point when the model can do the equivalent output of a whole company and then a whole country and then the whole world, like maybe we do want some sort of collective global supervision of that,” he said, a day before he was fired as OpenAI’s CEO. Newsom called the AI report an “important first step” as the state weighs some of the safety concerns that come with AI.

Natural Language Processing for Policy Analysis

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