White House To Explore Benefits, Risks of Artificial Intelligence via 4 Public Workshops

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be the focus of four public workshops over the next few months, said the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Tuesday. OSTP will be co-hosting the sessions with academic institutions, nonprofits and the National Economic Council. It said information gleaned from the discussions will be used to help develop a public report later this year. Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten wrote in a blog post the meetings will be May 24 in Seattle, June 7 in Washington, June 28 in Pittsburgh and July 7 in New York City. While AI is "confined to narrow, specific tasks," its influence is growing in areas such as education, healthcare, image- and voice-recognition, self-driving cars and drones, wrote Felten. But the technology also carries risks such as eliminating old jobs even as it creates new ones and predicting its behavior in certain scenarios, he said. Issues such as law, privacy, regulation, research and development and security also need to be taken into consideration, said Felten. Plus, he said the National Science and Technology Council's new Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence will have its inaugural meeting next week. The group, he said, will monitor AI and machine learning advances and technology milestones within the federal government, private sector and internationally and help coordinate federal activity on this issue.