In a letter written to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), a bipartisan collection of senators and representatives last week urged continued pursuit of artificial intelligence development, albeit with special care to ethics and safety.
Writers included U.S. Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Martin Heinrich (D-NM), along with U.S. Reps. Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH) and Anna Eshoo (D-CA). The same members addressed this issue through the NAIRR Task Force Act in 2020, which became law as part of the FY2021 National Defense Authorization Act.
“Smart individuals with good ideas should not need to work at a handful of large technology companies to have access to the computer power or other resources needed to research and deploy AI-based technologies,” the lawmakers wrote. “Our explicit aim for the NAIRR has been to democratize access to those resources, thereby diversifying the ranks of those working on cutting edge AI research and making an investment in the next wave of American competitiveness. The United States will only reap the benefits of AI if it is deployed at scale. Yet, deployment at scale is only possible—and desirable—if Americans of all walks of life trust that AI systems are working in their interest.”
While underscoring the importance of these tenets, the members lauded the organizations in question for their commitment to NAIRR thus far. That legislation called for a task force to create a path to the development of a national AI resource to be used for AI research and also convened a group of technical experts from academia, government, and industry to lay out guidelines for how the United States could build, deploy, govern and maintain a national research cloud and affiliated research resources.
That said, the bill’s writers recognized the potential for abuse, and in that regard, also called for an AI Bill of Rights to protect civil rights in the modern age. Partly for that reason, the lawmakers urged both the OSTP and NSF to tap the NAIRR Task Force as a tool during the development and deployment of ethical AI efforts. They previously supplied privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties requirements needed to properly pursue NAIRR and its research through the initial legislation – and reiterated that these should be articulated and followed in the creation of an AI Bill of Rights.
“As a federated, heterogeneous system-of-systems, the NAIRR should include a number of testbeds suited for conducting evaluations and research with implications for ethical AI across myriad disciplines and implementations,” the lawmakers wrote. “In this way, the NAIRR can be used to operationalize aims of the AI Bill of Rights while imbuing the AI Bill of Rights with the NAIRR’s core tenet of leveling the playing field for American’s access to technology.”
In the meantime, they want to see the NAIRR Task Force properly staffed and for an addendum to be made to the proposed bill of rights: the right to participate in creating and testing AI technology.