[HN Gopher] National Artificial Intelligence Initiative
___________________________________________________________________
National Artificial Intelligence Initiative
Author : KoftaBob
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-05-05 09:56 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ai.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ai.gov)
| throwaway823882 wrote:
| Can we work on getting real intelligence into Congress first?
| rexreed wrote:
| [*] Re-launches.
|
| The White House has had an AI.Gov site for a few years, operated
| by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. For a
| short while during the transition, the AI.Gov site redirected to
| a subsite managed by NIST, but now it is back to having a self-
| managed site.
|
| You can see the old AI.Gov site here:
| https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/
|
| The HN entry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446726
| [deleted]
| eplanit wrote:
| But now that it's associated with Biden, it's really, really
| wonderful!
| rwcarlsen wrote:
| Despite the sarcasm, I think your comment makes a really good
| point. People have lenses and biases that really make it
| difficult to objectively evaluate the actions of
| politicians/administrations independent of their like for the
| individuals in charge and other unrelated actions said
| politicians may have done.
| bosswipe wrote:
| It's also really hard to find just plain descriptions of
| what all the different federal departments are doing and
| what it means. It's mostly considered too boring for
| general news unless someone has been able to generate some
| drama around it. There are huge areas where there is no
| reporting at all. The best you'll get is industry specific
| news sources, but that will usually have a pro-industry
| bias.
| sharker8 wrote:
| Politicians deserve to be evaluated for their body of work
| and history which includes statements and actions which may
| cause one to either like or dislike them.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Yes. And voting is the judgement
| godelski wrote:
| That's reducing judgement down to a binary option which
| doesn't quite capture the breadth of actions. No
| president has only good policies. No president has only
| bad policies. All deserve some form of criticism and
| praise. Some more than others, in either direction. But
| reducing all this down to an election is ridiculous. They
| represent us. The system isn't vote them in and let them
| do whatever they want during those 4 years and then
| decide if that was good or not. We still need to operate
| in real time.
| rwcarlsen wrote:
| I wasn't commenting on evaluating politicians. I was
| commenting on evaluating things they are involved with
| and do.
| ffhhj wrote:
| What a great opportunity to evaluate politicians with the
| help of AI, comparing their speeches with the actual facts.
| version_five wrote:
| Is it common in the US to have this kind of "national
| initiative"?
|
| In Canada, we have various "National {x} strategies" but my
| perception is that they rarely accomplish anything and are more
| as favors to Canada's elites and for political gain.
|
| I had always associated this kind of thing more with our kind of
| political system. How is it percieved in the US?
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| In the USA, many technologies come out of government research
| labs, but almost exclusively from the defense space. As far as
| I know this type of thing hasn't really produced anything of
| note, but sometimes it does affect policy.
| Communitivity wrote:
| It all depends on the amount of funding and top-level
| support.
|
| Many technologies get created within DoD and rest of US
| government, with most not achieving widespread adoption (I'm
| using that as criteria for being of note).
|
| Some do, such as the Library of Congress classification
| system that replaced the Dewey decimal system in many
| libraries (https://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/) . Also, the
| internet, which grew out of Arpanet project
| (https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-
| internet/br...)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| curious you should mention it (from Canada) !
|
| "Since Canada published the world's first national AI strategy
| in 2017, more than 30 other countries and regions have
| published similar documents as of December 2020."
|
| "The launch of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) and
| Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
| AI Policy Observatory and Network of Experts on AI in 2020
| promoted intergovernmental efforts to work together to support
| the development of AI for all."
|
| source: AI Index Report 2021 from Stanford HAI Lab
|
| [0] https://oecd.ai/wonk/oecd-and-g7-artificial-intelligence-
| ini...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I'm not sure if there's a real strategy here or rather it's
| that one of the top researchers in the field, Turing Award
| recipient Yoshua Bengio made the explicit decision to stay in
| Montreal [0]. If the name sounds familiar, he's Samy Bengio's
| brother.
|
| [0] https://mila.quebec/en/person/bengio-yoshua/
| bigdict wrote:
| Samy Bengio is Yoshua Bengio's brother, not the other way
| around.
| version_five wrote:
| Brotherhood is not commutative!?
| Yajirobe wrote:
| "Continued American leadership in Artificial Intelligence is of
| paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national
| security of the United States."
|
| - President Donald J. Trump
| jschveibinz wrote:
| I love the concept. The White House has been lacking any form of
| intelligence for quite some time, so this is a step in the right
| direction.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| ++
| zedshawmotherfu wrote:
| And it's still devoid of it. Nothing to see here, other than
| performing pedantic prose.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| This initiative was started under a previous administration.
|
| https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ai/
| xpe wrote:
| > The White House has been lacking any form of intelligence
|
| This is exaggerated.
|
| What do you mean?
| KoftaBob wrote:
| It sounds like they're making a joke about the intelligence
| of past presidents.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| No need to limit yourself to the past.
| troelsSteegin wrote:
| It's from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
| (OSTP) [0]. The audience for OSTP is cross-Federal, and the
| contributing agency scope for this site is wide. The Office of
| Technology Assessment (OTA) [1] used to do this kind of
| technology policy work too. OTA served US Congress, is no more,
| and may or may not be worthing bringing back [2].
|
| Personally, I like seeing deep (no pun intended) technology
| expertise at work in US government. The Michael Lewis book "The
| Fifth Risk" was hagiographic that way.
|
| [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...
| [2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-
| the...
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Is anyone else kind of freaked out at how "AI" is treated? Like,
| AI includes everything from handwritten algorithms to data
| dashboards to neural networks -- and yet the concept seemingly
| assumes that, if people are involved in the information process,
| the AI isn't complete. I somehow find an AI focus deceptive and
| somehow unhealthy. Am I alone in this reaction?
| thesausageking wrote:
| I agree. You can usually replace "AI" with "software" and not
| lose anything. In this case, when you do that, I think it's a
| great idea that the US has a national software initiative to
| advance research in these areas, create more education and
| training, help industries use software, and better understand
| the risks of things like untrustworthy software.
| akomtu wrote:
| In the today's atmosphere, invention of AI would let the top few
| people (not percent, but people) absorb the entire wealth of the
| nation and have a completely loyal and merciless personal army
| powered by AI to cement their high status. Right now the too two
| persons in the US own more than the bottom 40%, but this status
| is shaky and depends on judicial framework run by people with
| their own opinions. AI would allow to remove this uncertainty.
| ffhhj wrote:
| Nowadays AI can recognize speech and search for data. Someone
| should implement an AI application to compare political
| discourses with actual facts and show the inconsistences in
| realtime. That's a way AI would make the world better.
| ilaksh wrote:
| That presumes that there is a completely unbiased person or
| group that knows what the objective truth is.
|
| What you can do is measure to some degree which direction
| certain publications or articles are leaning, such as
| left/right or establishment/anti-establishment. And whether
| they are more provocative, or more nuanced. That way you can
| be aware of biases and try to integrate information coming
| from different perspectives.
|
| https://www.improvethenews.org/
| akomtu wrote:
| There's no AI yet. But if it's invented, it will be promptly
| used to create autonomous quadracopter style drones that
| patrol and police their territory and recharge themselves
| when necessary. It'll be used to make an "agent smith" type
| of surveillance bot that listens to people talking at their
| homes (over the alexa and such mics) and intelligently find
| dissenters with an extreme accuracy. That's something every
| dictator would pay half his empire for.
| godelski wrote:
| Ah yes, the Ministry of Truth, what a great idea. Who decides
| that truth? You or me? Because I'll change my thoughts on if
| it is a great idea depending which you decide.
|
| The problem here is that frequently there isn't an objective
| truth. There's often a substantial amount of nuance involved
| too (something ML can't really process yet). You'll notice
| that fact checkers often limit what they fact check to
| subjects that are well documented and not contentious in the
| realm of experts in the field. Unfortunately many problems
| don't fit under this umbrella.
|
| Of course, you could do this in a limited sense, but there's
| a can of worms that comes with it. Unfortunately we don't
| know how big that can is, just that if we open it that
| there's worms inside. So we should be cautious.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think this statement rings true if your replace "AI" with
| most if not all technologies.
| bosswipe wrote:
| The difference is that with other tech if you have enough
| capital you can try to compete. With AI capital is not
| enough, you need oceans of data which is only available to
| the few companies that were able to position themselves early
| enough at the data spigots. For example, no matter how much
| capital Microsoft throws at it they aren't able to get access
| to all the data generated by mobile.
| aynyc wrote:
| This! I work for a company with ridiculous amount of data
| that goes back years. I just don't see how any new startups
| (even well funded ones) is gonna compete. It's not like
| they can go and ask users to resubmit the data.
| btowngar wrote:
| It's entirely feasible that you don't need ridiculous
| amounts of data to generate an AI - that's just the
| approach being taken by the vast majority of research
| teams.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Your scenario would be plausible if what was being created now
| was true "artificial intelligence", an actual means to reach
| human or high performance (and with that, I'm not sure what how
| even a few top people could share that power - it seems a bit
| like Sauron's ring there).
|
| But if we're talking present day deep-learning/machine-
| learning/etc, these system are not doing much than pattern
| recognition in an impressive, sometimes useful but never
| reliable way. They'll add to the capital of those on top but
| not be a fundamental game changer unless something changes (and
| their seem clearer despite more and more processing power being
| thrown at them).
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| They can call it the Fifth Generation Computer Systems
| initiative.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| When I opened the page I was disappointed to not see a picture of
| someone using confusing holographic ui's to navigate some sort of
| graph. Scrolling down, I see my fears were unnecessary. AI ==
| holographic UI.
|
| The girl in Education and Training appears to have no less than
| 16 unique holographic objects surrounding her.
|
| On the hand, the applications girl has a far simpler visual
| interface, but appears to require advanced spiderman hand gesture
| to properly interact with it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Completely off-topic, though related to your observation: one
| thing I greatly appreciated about the movie Her is that they
| never give any kind of visual representation of the AIs, not
| even an icon or anything. I thought this was a very bold
| choice, especially for a main character in a visual medium, and
| it made her (sic!) all the more memorable for it.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| They also do the scene where he plays video games with
| gesture controlled inputs but no sort of ui that demonstrates
| how to do them or how they're being received. An odd choice
| that stuck with me.
|
| I think it was a very good call to not show the AI visually,
| because it implied a much more emotional bond. The depth of
| his feelings might feel a bit superficial if the AI looks
| like Scarlet Johansson.
| dash2 wrote:
| Unfortunately AI has not yet advanced enough to remove the
| blocky gif artifacts when you zoom in on ET girl.
| coding123 wrote:
| Well, I was about to say - the applications girl is going to
| click on, what exactly, parts of the brain? Then there are
| these images like "$" or "mobile phone" or "chat"... If I was
| presented that interface, I mean what am I expected to get if I
| click on the Amygdala - like some kind of bitcoin pay out?
| klmadfejno wrote:
| That button dispenses advertisements to neuralink users.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| What's so wrong about it? It's ugly, but it's just a graphic.
| It's not like it's going to forever taint their research.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I think it's charming personally.
| nerbert wrote:
| It's a metaphor. Beautiful metaphor.
| relativeadv wrote:
| ok
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| A good thing, I suppose. I read through the first linked paper
| and there was so much boilerplate. Someone needs to train a
| transformer model to remove boilerplate for casual reading.
|
| I have to love the domain AI.gov, I wish I owned something
| similar. I do have M-x-AI.com, but that is really only meaningful
| to Emacs users, right over the head of vim users.
| rsfern wrote:
| Do you mean this OSTP report on cloud computing? Personally I
| think it's pretty straight to the point for a government report
| like this. There's like half a page introduction and it's
| straight to specific recommendations and goals. They even put
| the core idea for each point in bold...
|
| [pdf]: https://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/Recommendations-Cloud-AI-RD-
| Nov20...
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That was the paper. I agree with you that for government
| reports, it is not too verbose, I was just wishing that
| someone else would do the work of training a model to
| summarize government reports.
| panzagl wrote:
| A lot of US government boilerplate is to document
| authority, responsibility and jurisdiction- basically it's
| "Why we're qualified to spend the taxpayer's money doing
| this, who told us to do it, and why it's necessary".
| ape4 wrote:
| Big "Back to Top" button is big
| josefresco wrote:
| And it's on the left. I kind of like it.
| xpe wrote:
| Commentary about minutiae of the layout is uninteresting in my
| POV and per HN guidelines. Please help keep HN interesting.
| aboringusername wrote:
| I am hoping in the near term future we can have serious
| conversations about the usage of AI and where it stands legally,
| because from what I see in 2021 is an essential freeforall
| (clearview AI being one example). Can anyone link to me a
| comprehensive set of rules/laws governing AI, at all, in any
| country on earth?
|
| I assume it's now legal to collect whatever data you like, as
| much of it as you wish, and even if it leaks online (as the
| recent FB data breach did), you're "a-okay". Cool, so now I know
| PII is a fair game to collect, sell, profile, and use as I
| please, any actual real-world human impact from this (deaths,
| scams, anything in between) is not my problem. I know for a
| _fact_ I won 't be prosecuted, fined or challenged in any way
| (provided I'm Mark Zuckerberg and appease my overlords), anyone
| insignificant will get the book thrown at them as is typical.
|
| We seem to have a real issue with getting to grips with this new
| technology and how it can easily be used in both good ways to
| enhance industries but also work against humans (racial
| bias/profiling for example).
|
| I honestly am amazed "AI" is even legal today, it should be
| explicitly banned entirely until we decide on "ground rules" and
| slowly but surely open it up. Any usage of ANYTHING considered
| "AI" should go before a court - an "AI supreme court" if you
| will, and a license issued for exclusively that usage (and it
| would be monitored and its inputs/outputs tested, all software
| code/algorithms would be available to the court for review which
| would consist of highly renowned developers and those who
| understand how the tech works).
|
| But that's clearly not how America works - even if there's real
| human harm and suffering, the rules/laws only come later, after
| the bloodshed, far too late. It'll sadly be the same here.
| asdff wrote:
| AI is just statistics. Are we really going to make math
| illegal?
| version_five wrote:
| This is a fair point.
|
| 1. There is already a (terrible) precedent for making math
| illegal with encryption
|
| 2. What people really want to regulate is the use, and (my
| observation / paraphrase) it's really about how data is
| collected and aggregated, and what kind of data is used as
| the basis for automated decisions. The challenge is that this
| all gets bundled as "AI" and pushed by people that don't
| understand the underlying science, so there is a real danger
| I believe of accidentally outlawing some math, simply due to
| ignorance.
|
| I think part of the solution is calling out nontechnical "AI
| ethics/fairness/bias/trust etc" people that don't know what
| they are talking about but are pushing policy in response to
| their own misunderstanding of what modern "AI" is.
| xpe wrote:
| > AI is just statistics.
|
| Incorrect. There was AI before statistical machine learning.
|
| > Are we really going to make [AI] illegal?
|
| No. The question above is about the _uses_ of AI, not the
| least of which includes protected rights at a national level
| as well as international treaties regarding warfare and human
| rights.
| dfilppi wrote:
| A government with that power would be far worse than any AI
| could be
| dontreact wrote:
| FDA is heavily regulating medical AI products and there is an
| extensive legal framework around them. See 501k
| version_five wrote:
| There is a terminology problem.
|
| When you say AI, it sounds like you are mostly referring to
| automated data collection. This has one set of concerns.
|
| AI is also commonly used to mean algorithmic decision making.
| Again, a different set of concerns. The mechanism behind the
| decision is not really important, but people have concerns
| about e.g. fairness of automatically deciding based on a set of
| factors or on past trends. There are also concerns about the
| reliability of opaque AI models, because stakeholders dont
| understand how they work.
|
| There is also AI as sold by consulting firms which is usually
| just some variation on a BI dashboard, dressed up in modern
| lingo.
|
| And then I suppose there are some future concerns about actual
| AGI, that are more about having created some sentient thing,
| but those are more philosophical at this point.
|
| Normally I don't like getting hung up on terminology, but with
| AI, there are so many different meanings that it is best to use
| some other term, especially when we talk about what is
| regulated. It would be silly e.g. to be perceived as regulating
| linear regression when you are concerned about data collection.
| Lammy wrote:
| > And then I suppose there are some future concerns about
| actual AGI, that are more about having created some sentient
| thing, but those are more philosophical at this point.
|
| How would we know? We can't even explain our own sentience.
| zedshawmotherfu wrote:
| Give me a break!
| xbar wrote:
| I think your model for how laws get written is wrong.
|
| Among civilians, AI is more like we are in the 1930s with
| airplane clubs--advancing technology out of the love of the
| idea. Ethical questions are important, but the harms do not
| seem significant enough to regulate before experimenting.
|
| Among the military, it's more like we are in the 1950s with the
| US/USSR nuclear arms race. The (real or perceived) need to
| drive AI technology without regard to ethics whatsoever comes
| from an analysis of the opponent which says they are not
| regarding ethics.
|
| There are no laws for civilians regarding AI. There are no
| treaties for countries regarding AI. And there won't be until
| after someone gets hurt.
|
| This is the normal model for laws.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| The question is does this model work for potential
| civilization-ending technologies like AI, nano, geo-
| engineering or gene-editing? Should research that has a very-
| very low (but non-zero) chance of ending us all be regulated?
| Would that regulation even lower the chance?
| Datenstrom wrote:
| There are already export regulations on AI in the US[1],
| Europe is proposing some heavy restrictions[2], and there
| have been local bans on some uses already[3][4].
|
| [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050508/us-export-
| ban-ai-...
|
| [2]: https://www.wired.com/story/europes-proposed-limits-ai-
| globa...
|
| [3]: https://www.wired.com/story/portlands-face-recognition-
| ban-t...
|
| [4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-
| recognition-ban...
| wantsanagent wrote:
| If you're on twitter I recommend following Ryan Calo as he's a
| good gateway to the community discussing these issues.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I totally agree with the assertion that there appear to be no
| rules against data collection, or consequences for leaks.
|
| However, with respect to forbidding AI - the first thing this
| comment calls to mind is the Butlerian Jihad [1]. I am not
| optimistic.
|
| It is a dream to me to believe that AI use could be restricted
| by national laws, although the EU is trying. Your subcontractor
| in Country X is going to receive the clickstream and do
| "something" for you. I am having a hard time seeing how "train
| AI with the clickstream" is going to be forbidden (or that such
| use could ever be _proven_).
|
| I think the discussion has to be more fundamental than this.
| Even on HN I don't see a lot of coherent alternative
| suggestions.
|
| The genie is out of the bottle.
|
| Now what could we actually do about it, in a realistic
| productive way?
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)#The_Butlerian...
| gspr wrote:
| You might find the European Commission's recent legal framework
| proposal interesting: https://digital-
| strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory...
| Zer0Cooll wrote:
| In the U.S. at least, I think the FTC is already looking to
| overreach in this department. See FTC vs LabMD.
|
| You mean like a FISA court but for AI use? Look at how even
| FISA courts turned/are turning out. In a perfect world I would
| like to see the 3 laws of robotics to take precedent.
|
| I overheard someone at DefCon one year say that it isn't
| companies we should be afraid of but the guy that is on his 5th
| Red Bull of the night and is about to flick the switch to on.
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