US President Joe Biden will discuss the “risks and opportunities” that artificial intelligence poses for people, society and national security during a meeting with science and technology advisers at the White House on Tuesday, an official said.
Biden, a Democrat, is scheduled to meet with the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) on the same day that his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, surrenders in New York over charges stemming from a probe into hush money paid to a porn star.
Biden has declined to comment on Trump’s legal woes, and Democratic strategists say his focus on governing will create a politically advantageous split screen of sorts as his former rival, a Republican, deals with his legal challenges.
“The president will discuss the importance of protecting rights and safety to ensure responsible innovation and appropriate safeguards,” a White House official said in a statement ahead of Biden’s meeting.
“He will call on Congress to pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect kids and limit personal data tech companies collect on all of us.”
Last year the Biden administration released a blueprint “Bill of Rights” to help ensure users’ rights are protected as technology companies design and develop AI systems.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence or AI is becoming a hot topic for policymakers.
Tech ethics group Center for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Policy has asked the US Federal Trade Commission month to stop OpenAI from issuing new commercial releases of GPT-4, which has wowed and appalled users with its human-like abilities to generate written responses to requests.
Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy has urged society to pause as it considers the ramifications of AI.
But, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has said calls to pause the development of artificial intelligence will not solve the challenges ahead.
In his first public comment since an open letter sparked a debate about the future of the technology, the technologist-turned-philanthropist said it would be better to focus on how best to use the developments in AI, as it was hard to understand how a pause could work globally.
He made this remark during an interview with Reuters after an open letter was published last week, co-signed by Elon Musk and more than 1,000 AI experts. In the letter, the experts demanded an urgent pause in the development of systems “more powerful” than Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s new GPT-4, which can hold human-like conversation, compose songs and summarise lengthy documents.
The experts, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, said in the letter the potential risks and benefits to society need to be assessed.
“I don’t think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges,” Gates said on Monday. “Clearly, there’s huge benefits to these things what we need to do is identify the tricky areas.”
Microsoft has sought to outpace peers through multi-billion-dollar investments in ChatGPT owner OpenAI.
While currently focused full-time on the philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Gates has been a bullish supporter of AI and described it as revolutionary as the Internet or mobile phones.
In a blog titled ‘The Age of AI has begun’, which was published and dated March 21, a day before the open letter, he said he believes AI should be used to help reduce some of the worlds worst inequities.
He also said in the interview the details of any pause would be complicated to enforce.
“I don’t really understand who they’re saying could stop, and would every country in the world agree to stop, and why to stop, he said. But there are a lot of different opinions in this area.”
