Maverick's Update

What does Henry Kissinger (the 97-year-old former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon and President Ford) know about artificial intelligence? Enough to co-author a book called “The Age of AI” with Eric Schmidt, the onetime Google CEO and co-founder of Schmidt Futures, and Daniel Huttenlocher, the dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. This powerful team gave a preview of the book in an article published in The Atlantic in 2019, saying they met for three years trying to figure out how AI will impact humanity — and healthcare seems to be a major focus. AI is already being used / explored in the healthcare space, and this team of brainiacs suggest that we should create a new field called “AI ethics” to add thoughtfulness to the excitement — but it seems like that is already happening too. Google announced it plans to double the size of its team studying AI ethics after a controversy over firing two researchers, and Apple announced it hired one of the AI experts that just left Google AI. Companies including IBM and Microsoft have already taken steps to incorporate AI ethics into their plans — Microsoft has a mandatory “Intro to Responsible AI” course for its employees, and IBM has an internal ethics board. For its part, the Brookings Institution just analyzed the AI plans of 34 countries, using ethics as one of the evaluating measures. The world’s largest technical professional organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (members are mostly engineers and scientists), created a five-course program called AI Standards: Roadmap for Ethical and Responsible Digital Environments. So… what federal government agency oversees AI and all of these ethical considerations? Well, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is working on it, and just launched a new website to make the federal government activities related to the “responsible use of trustworthy artificial intelligence” more transparent to everyone. Which is interesting, because the former administration also launched the same website in March 2019. Stick around, maybe by the time we are Henry Kissinger’s age, we will have a handle on this.