Senate Homeland Security Committee Considers Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence

Kelly Adkins is the business and finance reporter for the Medill News Service, M.S. Journalism, of Northwestern University, covering the tech and money beat. Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs committee chairman, Gary Peters (D-MI) converses with expert witnesses at the Nov. 8 hearing on “The Philosophy of AI: Learning from history, shaping our future.” Photo: Kelly Adkins WASHINGTON — Artificial intelligence (AI) experts on Wednesday urged Congress to jump into the intimidating world of regulating AI and avoid some of the pitfalls of the past, when the government failed to rein in transformative technology. On the morning of November 8, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee hosted a hearing titled “The Philosophy of AI: Learning from history, shaping our future.” “This is not the first time that humans have developed staggering new innovations. Such moments in history have not just made our technologies more advanced, they’ve affected our politics, influenced our culture, and changed the fabric of our society,” the chairman of the committee, Sen. Gary Peters, D-MI, said in his opening remarks. Past waves of technological change disrupted society in different ways. Today, AI promises widespread automation, which was also a consequence of the British Industrial Revolution and, in the US, mechanization and agriculture in the 1800s. In his testimony, Dr. Daron Acemoglu, an economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said during that time, automation ultimately created millions of jobs. In modern days, however, his work found downsides to automation. “Automation accounts…Senate Homeland Security Committee Considers Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence