Who watches the guardrails of AI? MONEY & MARKETS EXTRA
When President Joe Biden has questions about artificial intelligence, one expert he turns to is his science adviser Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Prabhakar is helping guide the U.S. approach to safeguarding AI technology, relying in part on cooperation from big American tech firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta who’ve made commitments to voluntary standards.
The engineer and applied physicist is coming at the problem from a career bridging work in government — including leading the Defense Department’s advanced technology research arm — and the private sector as a former Silicon Valley executive and venture capitalist. She spoke with The Associated Press ahead of a White House-organized test of
AI systems at the Defcon hacker convention in Las Vegas.
Does the president come to ask you about AI?
I’ve had the great privilege of talking with him several times about artificial intelligence. Those are great conversations because he’s laser-focused on understanding what it is and how people are using it. Then immediately he just goes to the consequences and deep implications. Those have been some very good conversations. Very exploratory, but also very focused on action.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (who’s pushing for AI regulations) says making AI models explainable is a priority. How realistic is that?
It’s a technical feature of these deep-learning, machine-learning systems, that they are opaque. They are black box in nature. But most of the risks that we deal with as human beings come from things that are not explainable. As an example, I take a medicine every single day. While I can’t actually predict exactly how it’s going to interact with the cells in my body, we have found ways to make pharmaceuticals safe enough. Think about drugs before we had clinical trials. You could hawk some powder or syrup and it might make you better or it might kill you. But when we have clinical trials and a process in place, we started having the technical means to know enough to start harnessing the value of pharmaceuticals. This is the journey we have to be on now for artificial intelligence. We’re not going to have perfect measures, but I think we can get to the point where we know enough about the safety and effectiveness of these systems to really use them and to get the value that they can offer.
Do you have a timeline for future actions (such as a planned Biden executive order)? Will it include enforceable accountability measures for AI developers?
Many measures are under consideration. don’t have a timeline for you. I will just say fast. And that comes directly from the top. The president has been clear that this is an urgent issue.