Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) set the tone for a hearing on “Advances in AI: Are We Ready For a Tech Revolution” with an opening statement that no human wrote.
“I believe this is the first opening statement of a hearing generated by chat GPT or other AI models,” Mace, chairwoman of the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, said at its first hearing March 8.
Artificial intelligence technology will drive the next wave of technological advancement, but there needs to be a balance between using the power of AI to improve lives and trying to ensure that AI does not become a tool for criminals or foreign adversaries, according to the hearing memo.
Ranking Member Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.) said that Congress must foster thoughtful discussions to balance the benefits of innovation against the potential risks of AI.
“As with all technologies in the wrong hands, AI could be used to hack financial data, steal National Intelligence, and create deep lakes blurring people's abilities to certify reality and so further distress within our democracy,” he said.
Witnesses who testified included Eric Schmidt, chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project; Scott Crowder, vice president and chief technology officer of IBM Systems, Technical Strategy, and Transformation; Aleksander Mądry, the director of Cadence Design Systems Professor of Computing, MIT Center for Deployable Machine Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and; Merve Hickok, chair and research director, Center for AI and Digital Policy, according to the committee’s website.
Schmidt offered principles for AI platform interactions. They need to know the content's origins to avoid misinformation from sources like Russian actors. The users need to be known to avoid nation-state attacks, and AI’s algorithms must be published.
“The ability to have non-human intelligences that we work with and occasionally have to deal with is a major change in human history and not one that we will go back to,” he said.
Accompanying the opportunities are risks, such as AI’s lack of reliability and its propensity for enhancing social inequities, Mądry said.
The ease of communicating with AI leads people to treat it as human, he said.
“But this is insane," Mądry said. "These tools are inhuman, they are simple computations executed at impressive scale."
The countries investing in this technology now will reap benefits in the years to come, Crowder said. Those countries that don’t will be at a competitive disadvantage. Countries need to invest time and energy in developing a regulatory environment to support the adoption of trustworthy AI.
“We know that trustworthiness is key to AI adoption, and the first step in promoting trust is effective risk management policies and practices,” Crowder said.
Hickok said the hearing’s title asks if they are ready for a tech revolution.
“We don’t have the guardrails in place, the laws that we need, the public education or the expertise in the government to manage the consequences of the rapid technological changes,” she said.
Eight Republican and seven Democratic members, including Mace and Connolly, comprise the subcommittee, its website reported.
