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It’s time for Washington to start working on artificial intelligence Posted on : Jan 17 - 2018

One of the more unexpected sights within the United States Capitol lies just outside the Old Supreme Court Chamber. There you can find a plaque marking the first ever long-distance communication by electronic telegraph, which took place inside the Capitol in 1844, when Samuel Morse sent and received messages from Baltimore.

Morse’s first experimental line was made possible thanks to a grant from the federal government. The telegraph would go on to transform American life, allowing instant communication across vast distances. Suddenly, we were not bound by the speed of the horse or the ship and the world would never be the same.

Visitors to the Capitol today wouldn’t expect to see cutting edge experiments taking place inside the building and sadly, they probably don’t have much faith that Congress is even thinking about the future at all. This shows up in the rhetoric and it shows up in our budgets. Washington spends way too much time re-litigating the past — witness how much time has been devoted to debating old trade deals, the 2010 Affordable Care Act or the 1980s Reagan tax cuts — and has increasingly budgeted and legislated in a backwards looking way.

Instead of embracing the trends of the future and empowering our citizens, too many policymakers would rather roll back the clock. According to data collected by the Brookings Institute, federal investment in research and development has declined significantly in recent decades, falling from 2.23% of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the 1960s to just 0.77% in 2016 (GDP). Think about that, across the same decades when we saw a globally-connected high-tech economy emerge, we dramatically scaled back investment in R&D.

As the founder of the Artificial Intelligence Caucus, I’ve been working to start a new dialogue on Capitol Hill that is focused on the future. Recently, I introduced the House version of the FUTURE of AI Act that would create a formal process for both Congress and the Executive Branch to start looking at AI seriously, asking hard questions and consulting experts on what the next steps should be.

When I talk to people in the private sector, in research, in the sciences, AI dominates the discussion. Moreover, artificial intelligence isn’t just analogous to previous groundbreaking technologies like the steam engine, the telegraph, the microchip — it’s potentially even more transformative, because it represents an innovation that reaches across technologies and disciplines, from health care to transportation and logistics and beyond.

The goal of the AI Caucus is to bring in academicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, ethicists, etc. and have them brief Congress on what’s happening in AI, what it means and what we need to do. Our caucus is bipartisan and co-chaired by my friend Republican Rep. Pete Olson of Texas. View More