Rosenworcel Remains Optimistic About AI's Potential Benefits

The FCC’s Technological Advisory Council held its first meeting under its new charter, with a focus on wireless technology. As such, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel told TAC members they should help change Washington's negative tone when it discusses AI. The new TAC's efforts are just starting under three working groups: advanced spectrum sharing, AI/machine learning (ML) and 6G.

“The pressure is on,” Rosenworcel said. “While the rest of the world is still talking about 5G, we are going to be careening ahead, and you will be leading the way,” she said. While there are many warnings about AI, “I am the contrarian. I am the optimist,” she said: “There are a lot of upsides if we think about how we can use this technology for network optimization and network resiliency.” She called on TAC to provide examples of AI's benefits.

Advanced spectrum sharing technologies are important, Rosenworcel said. Policymakers should be “a lot more thoughtful” about how spectrum is allocated, she said. “We want to be open to all good ideas, all good opportunities.” Participation of the commercial sector is critical, she said. “You have an interest in optimizing our airwaves” while protecting incumbent users, Rosenworcel said. “You may also see opportunities others miss.”

Rosenworcel said she loves all the FCC advisory committees, but TAC has a “record of achievement that really stands out.”

Many TAC members work for companies or organizations that don’t spend a lot of time interacting with the FCC, said TAC Chair Dean Brenner, a former Qualcomm executive, starting his second term as chair. “We’re very glad to have you -- we’re glad to have you give us perspectives on all these issues that the FCC doesn’t hear every single day,” he said.

Brenner said TAC’s work is more important than ever as 5G and 5G-advanced “evolve and improve and roll out more broadly,” Wi-Fi 7 begins to be deployed, satellite-based 5G deployments start, “fiber continues to deepen and broaden” and advanced spectrum sharing “becomes even more important.” All of those developments are important in isolation, but “even more important when viewed together.”

Several “fairly prominent publications” have a negative view of AI, with one equating AI's power to the power of atomic weapons, said Adam Drobot, co-chair of the AI/ML WG. Other experts recently signed a letter saying we should stop work on AI because of the risk of artificial general intelligence competing with human intelligence, Drobot said.

Drobot, also chair of OpenTechWorks, takes a more optimistic view. “This is not about how the human mind works -- it’s about how we get the value of computing … to solve some of the difficult technical problems that we have in telecommunications,” he said. The WG was given a long list of issues to explore and will spend early meetings narrowing the focus, he said.

TAC also heard the early thinking of the 6G WG. The WG must be careful to avoid a tendency to hype the next generation of wireless, said Henning Schulzrinne, a former FCC chief technologist now at Columbia University. Similar work on 5G was, “let's just say, less than predictive in terms of applications, in terms of impact, in terms of the economics,” he said.

The goal is “cutting through the hype” and providing recommendations to the FCC “on the key topics that they need to be aware of as 6G develops,” said WG co-Chair Brian Daly, AT&T assistant vice president.

Daly noted the work of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and other groups. Unless someone is “deeply involved” in all of that, “it’s kind of hard to sort through all the hype and understand what’s real, what’s important.”

This is TAC’s second look at 6G and the first time the group tried to encompass everything in its report, said Abhimanyu Gosain, senior director of the Institute for the Wireless IoT at Northeastern University. This time “we can be a little bit smarter, make the different connections,” he said.

The WG needs to focus on “real and true data” and what’s working so far and what isn’t, Gosain said. “The idea is to present the facts in a completely neutral and unbiased way and then leave that for interpretation to the commission,” he said.

“Merely reflecting the hype is a very short-term strategy” and “we don’t want to fall into that,” Brenner said: “At the end of the day, the truth is going to emerge.”