Advocates Call For New US Federal Authority On Artificial Intelligence

By David Branigan for Intellectual Property Watch

Public Knowledge, a Washington, DC advocacy group, today released a paper calling for the formation of a new federal government authority to develop expertise and capacity on artificial intelligence (AI), to be able to effectively regulate and govern these technologies in the future.

The paper, The Inevitability of AI Law & Policy: Preparing Government for the Era of Autonomous Machines, was released on 31 October and written by Ryan Clough, general counsel at Public Knowledge.

The paper “argues that the rapid and pervasive rise of artificial intelligence risks exploiting the most marginalized and vulnerable in our society.”

In order to mitigate these harms, a new national authority on AI will be needed, it says, to “provide the rest of the government with the expertise and experience needed to achieve five goals crucial to building ethical AI systems:

• Boosting sector-specific regulators and confronting overarching policy challenges raised by AI;
• Protecting public values in government procurement and implementation of AI;
• Attracting AI practitioners to civil service, and building durable and centralized AI expertise within government;
• Identifying major gaps in the laws and regulatory frameworks that govern AI; and
• Coordinating strategies and priorities for international AI governance.”