Artificial intelligence (AI) technology’s dramatic surge in the private marketplace has caught lawmakers’ attention.
This, as leaders of the G7 nations — the U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan — have all agreed to hold cabinet level discussions around a common vision of AI oversight in what they are calling the “Hiroshima Process.”
The AI-focused tenor of G7 Summit came just days after OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress (May 16) saying that, “the U.S. government should consider a combination of licensing or registration requirements for development and release of AI models … alongside incentives for full compliance with these requirements.”
Now, U.S. senators Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) have introduced a bill, the Digital Platform Commission Act, proposing the creation of a new, five-member federal agency, the Federal Digital Platform Commission, to regulate AI and other transformative technologies.
“Technology is moving quicker than Congress could ever hope to keep up with. We need an expert federal agency that can stand up for the American people and ensure AI tools and digital platforms operate in the public interest,” Bennet said.
“There’s no reason that the biggest tech companies on Earth should face less regulation than Colorado’s small businesses,” he added.
See also: The Race to Regulate AI Risks Could Reshape Global Markets
Concern About Disruptive Potential of Rapidly Growing Technologies
The idea of establishing a dedicated technology regulator has been passed around Washington for years, but powerful lobbying interests, as well as fears of hamstringing innovation — one of America’s greatest exports — have so far kept lawmakers on the sidelines, allowing technological advances to continually transform both domestic and global economies.
“The last time the United States passed meaningful regulation impacting the tech sector was in the late ’90s during Microsoft’s antitrust case,” PYMNTS wrote last week (May 16).
Now, those major digital platforms which have become foundationally central to day-to-day life continue to operate without the degree of regulatory oversight that other critical industries including medicine, finance and telecommunications are subject to.
Adding to policymakers’ concerns is the fact that AI capabilities, for their part, are increasingly being interwoven into those foundational digital platforms.
European Union lawmakers voted earlier this month (May 11) to approve a draft form of milestone regulations over the use of AI, including restrictions on chatbots like ChatGPT as well as a ban on the use of facial recognition in public and on predictive policing tools.
“We are way behind the curve, but that’s often where we reside,” said Sen. Bennet.
Read more: Washington Races to Develop and Implement Effective AI Policy
“We are not alone in developing this technology,” OpenAI’s Altman told U.S. lawmakers last Tuesday. “It will be important for policymakers to consider how to implement licensing regulations on a global scale and ensure international cooperation on AI safety, including examining potential intergovernmental oversight mechanisms and standard-setting.”
IBM Chief Privacy and Trust Officer Christina Montgomery also urged Congress to adopt a “precision regulation” approach to AI, establishing rules to govern the deployment of AI in specific use-cases, not regulating the technology itself.
“A wrench can be used to assemble a desk or construct an airplane, yet the rules governing those two end products are not primarily based on the wrench — they are based on use,” Montgomery said.
“This focus on regulatory guardrails established by Congress does not — not by any stretch — let business off the hook for its role in enabling the responsible deployment of AI,” she added, emphasizing that Congress should separately formalize disclosure requirements to ensure Americans “know when they are interacting with an AI system.”
The Ongoing Innovation-Regulation Dilemma
“Anybody who proposes a government review commission that would have to approve things is talking about a regulatory body with an awful lot of rules that we don’t know how to write right now,” Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said in an NBC News interview last Sunday (May 14).
“There’s no way a non-industry person can understand what’s possible,” Schmidt added. “What I’d much rather do is have an agreement among the key players that we will not have a race to the bottom.”
Separately, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group that includes Alphabet Inc. and Amazon, issued a statement following last week’s AI hearing that warned U.S. lawmakers against “creating additional layers of bureaucracy that could impede both oversight and progress.”
The Biden administration has already said it would apply existing laws to AI in areas including lending, employment decisions, fraud and competition. Only time will tell whether that will be effective enough.
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