Americans dont have to be beholden to the tech Goliaths to get the benefits of artificial intelligence. An alternative possibility is for government to provide the infrastructure needed for a technological future through a public option for artificial intelligence.
Big tech companies have an extraordinary amount of data about how we behave, largely because they engage in widespread surveillance of much of our behavior. Because A.I. depends on data, these companies have a huge market advantage over start-ups and entrepreneurs and its a gap that will only get wider. The lax regulatory environment hasnt helped, either; instead, it has allowed the biggest tech companies to acquire their rivals, stifle competition and snatch up the best software engineers and data scientists. Together, these dynamics make it hard for start-ups, governments and nonprofits to develop and use artificial intelligence without relying on big tech companies, effectively ceding influence over this developing field to a private sphere distorted by anti-competitive practices.
The alternative is a public option for A.I. The public option, a term familiar from debates over health care, is a public program that provides universal access to goods and services, with a private opt-out. A public option for A.I. wouldnt prevent companies like Google from collecting and using data. But it would provide a pathway for start-ups and public-sector organizations to develop abilities and products that would compete with those of the tech giants. Although the Trump administration released an executive order on A.I. this year, we believe that a broader conceptual framework for the public option for A.I. coupled with significant financial resources from Congress is an opportunity for all levels of government to take control of technology for their constituents and engage them deeply in the development of the rules by which it is governed and used.
Our proposal has three components: The first is a public data pool that would make data accessible to registered users. Local, state and federal governments have sizable data resources that would seed this digital commons. Users would be verified to block foreign governments, hackers and others with ill motives from access, and users would be prevented from using the data to engage in racial or other forms of discrimination and for microtargeted advertising.
Some of the data may be very sensitive, and access to those resources would be highly regulated. We can imagine a variety of ways that regulation and technology together could protect privacy and still foster innovation: Data could be anonymized at the source; the commons could have an interface that allowed users to derive insight from the data set, while leaving the underlying information inaccessible; less sensitive data, like weather information, could be made available in a format optimized for training A.I. Whats more, methods for safely sharing A.I. models without disclosing the underlying data are being developed today and could enable users of the data commons to collaborate on public-interest A.I. services. The federal government should also invest in researching new and better ways to protect privacy and prevent misuse.
Second, a public option for artificial intelligence would include a significant increase in research and development spending. Proponents of big tech celebrate private-sector research and are right to do so. But big tech companies, like all companies, have an incentive to fund research that will support their bottom line, and the profit motive doesnt always mean a focus on the most important problems.
For generations, government R&D spending has been one of the central engines of economic growth and technological progress in America. Yet China is projected to spend far more than the United States on A.I. research over the next decade. A sizable increase in research funding for companies, governments and nonprofits developing public-interest technologies would help expand the types of research taking place and give scientists and engineers the option to do groundbreaking work on a broader range of problems.
Third, much of governments A.I. work takes place in the military sector and is applied to national security problems. But health care, transportation, energy and other areas could also benefit significantly from A.I. The federal government should expand its A.I. procurement across all of these sectors as an opportunity to improve public services for all Americans. In addition, the government should ensure that its use of algorithms meets the highest ethical standards.
A public option for A.I. cant solve every problem related to technology and surveillance, and it would require careful thinking about public governance of these programs including a commitment to privacy and awareness of biases. But it would help address the problem of a small number of companies having virtually all power over this technology. It would facilitate the conditions for a competitive market with many players and many new innovations, all while preserving our democratic values and improving our society.
Ben Gansky (@bengansky) is executive director of Free Machine and a researcher and designer at the Institute for the Futures Equitable Futures Lab. Michael Martin is policy director for Free Machine and head of communities at SignalFire. Ganesh Sitaraman (@ganeshsitaraman), a professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School, is a co-author of The Public Option: How to Expand Freedom, Increase Opportunity, and Promote Equality.
Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.
Visit link:
Artificial Intelligence Is Too Important to Leave to Google and Facebook Alone - The New York Times
- Classic reasoning systems like Loom and PowerLoom vs. more modern systems based on probalistic networks - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using Amazon's cloud service for computationally expensive calculations - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software environments for working on AI projects - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of my NLP toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Semantic Web: through the back door with HTML and CSS - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Java FastTag part of speech tagger is now released under the LGPL - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Defining AI and Knowledge Engineering - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Great Overview of Knowledge Representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Something like Google page rank for semantic web URIs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My experiences writing AI software for vehicle control in games and virtual reality systems - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The URL for this blog has changed - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- I have a new page on Knowledge Management - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- N-GRAM analysis using Ruby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Good video: Knowledge Representation and the Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Using the PowerLoom reasoning system with JRuby - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machines Like Us - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- RapidMiner machine learning, data mining, and visualization tool - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- texai.org - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NLTK: The Natural Language Toolkit - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My OpenCalais Ruby client library - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Ruby API for accessing Freebase/Metaweb structured data - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Protégé OWL Ontology Editor - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New version of Numenta software is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Very nice: Elsevier IJCAI AI Journal articles now available for free as PDFs - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Verison 2.0 of OpenCyc is available - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What’s Your Biggest Question about Artificial Intelligence? [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Minimax Search [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Tree [Knowledge] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- More AI Content & Format Preference Poll [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- New Planners Solve Rescue Missions [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Learns to Bluff at Poker [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pushing the Limits of Game AI Technology [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mining Data for the Netflix Prize [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Interview with Peter Denning on the Principles of Computing [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Decision Making for Medical Support [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neural Network Creates Music CD [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- jKilavuz - a guide in the polygon soup [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial General Intelligence: Now Is the Time [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Apply AI 2007 Roundtable Report [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What Would You do With 80 Cores? [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Software Finds Learning Language Child's Play [News] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence in Games [Article] - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Artificial Intelligence Resources - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Alan Turing: Mathematical Biologist? - April 25th, 2012 [April 25th, 2012]
- BBC Horizon: The Hunt for AI ( Artificial Intelligence ) - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Can computers have true artificial intelligence" Masonic handshake" 3rd-April-2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Kevin B. Korb - Interview - Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity p3 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence - 6 Month Anniversary - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Science Breakthroughs - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Hitman: Blood Money - Part 49 - Stupid Artificial Intelligence! - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Research Members Turned Off By HAARP Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence Lecture No. 5 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 2012 - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Charlie Rose - Artificial Intelligence - Video - April 30th, 2012 [April 30th, 2012]
- Expert on artificial intelligence to speak at EPIIC Nights dinner - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Filipino software engineers complete and best thousands on Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Vodafone xone™ Hackathon Challenges Developers and Entrepreneurs to Build a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence ... - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Packages Up CPG Booster - May 4th, 2012 [May 4th, 2012]
- 2 Filipinos finishes among top in Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence course - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- Why Your Brain Isn't A Computer - May 5th, 2012 [May 5th, 2012]
- 2 Pinoy software engineers complete Stanford's AI course - May 7th, 2012 [May 7th, 2012]
- Percipio Media, LLC Proudly Accepts Partnership With MIT's Prestigious Computer Science And Artificial Intelligence ... - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Google Driverless Car Ok'd by Nevada - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel and Forrester Research Announce Free Webinar - May 10th, 2012 [May 10th, 2012]
- Rocket Fuel Wins 2012 San Francisco Business Times Tech & Innovation Award - May 13th, 2012 [May 13th, 2012]
- Internet Week 2012: Rocket Fuel to Speak at OMMA RTB - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- How to Get the Most Out of Your Facebook Ads -- Rocket Fuel's VP of Products, Eshwar Belani, to Lead MarketingProfs ... - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- The Digital Disruptor To Banking Has Just Gone International - May 16th, 2012 [May 16th, 2012]
- Moving Beyond the Marketing Funnel: Rocket Fuel Announce Free Webinar Featuring an Independent Research Firm - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- MASA Showcases Latest Version of MASA SWORD for Homeland Security Markets - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Bluesky Launches Drones for Aerial Surveying - May 23rd, 2012 [May 23rd, 2012]
- Artificial Intelligence: What happened to the hunt for thinking machines? - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- Bubble Robots Move Using Lasers [VIDEO] - May 25th, 2012 [May 25th, 2012]
- UHV assistant professors receive $10,000 summer research grants - May 27th, 2012 [May 27th, 2012]
- Artificial intelligence: science fiction or simply science? - May 28th, 2012 [May 28th, 2012]
- Exetel taps artificial intelligence - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- Software offers brain on the rain - May 29th, 2012 [May 29th, 2012]
- New Dean of Science has high hopes for his faculty - May 30th, 2012 [May 30th, 2012]
- Cognitive Code Announces "Silvia For Android" App - May 31st, 2012 [May 31st, 2012]
- A Rat is Smarter Than Google - June 5th, 2012 [June 5th, 2012]