ChatGPT and other next-generation strains of artificial intelligence have revolutionized the tech world over the past year, and policymakers are ramping up their efforts to respond.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Washington state Democrat who chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, says the situation reminds her of the way the G.I. Bill opened up opportunities for veterans returning home from World War II.
“Now, instead of a G.I. Bill, we need an AI education bill,” she said today during a Future of AI Forum conducted in downtown Seattle. “We need a bill that says, how do we educate for the future, given the impacts of AI? How do we offer the training and the skill set so people can adapt now in the workplace?”
Cantwell’s forum provided an opportunity for AI startups in Washington state to show how their ventures could bring fresh innovations to a wide variety of fields — and provided an opportunity for leaders from government, academia, industry and labor to lay out their ideas for supporting and regulating AI.
“We tend to use the phrase ‘It’s Day One’ in the age of internet,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of database, analytics and machine learning at Amazon Web Services. “But in this phase, I would say it’s Day One, we just woke up and we haven’t even had a cup of coffee yet.”
AI has been on the tech policy agenda for years: In 2016, for example, the White House explored the implications of the AI revolution in a series of workshops that started out in Seattle. That led to legislation including the National AI Initiative Act of 2020 as well as the AI Training Act, which was signed into law last year.
Those measures largely focused on how federal agencies dealt with artificial intelligence. Cantwell said it’s high time to widen the focus of the federal government’s efforts to take in everyday Americans.
“You want workers to be trained and skilled in AI so that they can use the benefits,” she told GeekWire after today’s forum finished up. “I think that would strengthen us and strengthen our workforce. And then I think you have to plan better for transformations and disruptions that might happen.”
For years, studies have suggested that AI technologies will disrupt employment in a wide spectrum of occupations. Last month, analysts at McKinsey Global Institute predicted that up to 30 percent of the hours currently worked across the U.S. economy could be automated by 2030, with generative AI accelerating the trend.
Cherika Carter, secretary-treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO, noted that generative AI is a big issue in one of the country’s highest-profile work stoppages, involving Hollywood actors and writers. When it comes to dealing with the effects of AI in the workplace, “working people must be at the center of the conversation,” she said.
After reviewing what companies such as CalmWave and public-private partnerships like the AgAID Institute are doing, Cantwell said health care and agriculture were prime targets for AI innovation.
She also said AI might be able to address the challenges created by climate change. “There’s so much that’s impacting and costing us today on weather, that if we were just a little bit more informed, a little bit more prepared — not that Mother Nature isn’t going to have her way, but we would be better at our response,” Cantwell said.
AI is also having an impact on aerospace, one of Washington state’s core industries. Sivasubramanian cited an experiment that Autodesk and Airbus conducted with support from AWS, in which generative AI was used to design an aircraft support structure that was 45% lighter than the components that are traditionally used.
Today’s forum also addressed the potential pitfalls of the AI revolution: Cantwell noted that she’s introduced privacy legislation designed to make sure AI isn’t used to discriminate against people — and Ryan Calo, co-founder of the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab, said privacy is just one of the legal issues that need to be addressed.
“Other areas such as security, labor, copyright — even the practice of law itself — need to be updated,” he said. For example, this year marked the approval of a Washington state law that will require clear disclosure when election-related media products contain manipulated or synthetic “deepfake” imagery or audio.
There’s likely to be a new wave of federal AI legislation on the horizon. “Congress is literally full of ideas now about what to do about AI,” Cantwell said.
Once Congress gets back in session, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., plans to ramp up a series of “AI Insight Forums” to gather input for an initiative he calls the SAFE Innovation Framework.
Cantwell acknowledged that it’s not easy to keep pace with AI’s rapid rise.
“I think it’s hard for government to keep pace with technology in general,” she told GeekWire. “I think that’s a hard thing. And I think now what we need is for people to understand … how the United States can be a winner, both in protecting our competitiveness and on national security issues. That’s what I really want our government to understand.”
