The U.S. needs a new commission to investigate and brief President Trump on the growing challenges and security threats of artificial intelligence, a House Armed Services panel chairwoman says.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., has introduced a bill that would create the independent commission and give it a wide mandate to look into how the rapidly developing field of machine learning, something that military competitors such as China are already embracing, and how it could affect the United States.
The commission would complete a comprehensive, national-level review of advances in the field and then present the findings to Trump.
“Artificial Intelligence is a constantly developing technology that will likely touch every aspect of our lives,” Stefanik, who chairs the Armed Services emerging threats subcommittee, said in a statement unveiling the bill. “It is critical to our national security but also to the development of our broader economy that the United States becomes the global leader in further developing this cutting edge technology.”
Stefanik said she will look to add the legislation into the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that sets defense policy.
The nascent artificial intelligence tech is already being used in automated robots, self-driving cars, object recognition in photos and videos, and prediction models, she said.
Many believe it will also revolutionize war fighting. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has taken a keen interest in the technology and highlighted the need for more work during a visit last year to the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Experimental Unit in Silicon Valley.
“The bottom line is we will get better at integrating the advances in AI that are being taken here in the Valley into the U.S. military,” Mattis said.
Artificial intelligence could be used for enemy surveillance, better training of fighter pilots and others, and could replace military software systems that need to be periodically refreshed, according to the Rand Corp.
“Computer vision, the ability of software to understand photos and videos, could greatly help in processing the mountains of data from surveillance systems or for ‘pattern-of-life’ surveillance,” Rand reported.
But the Trump administration has yet to take a clear tack on AI.
Meanwhile, the U.S. faces growing challenges from abroad. China announced last year it plans to become the global leader in AI by 2030, while it also challenges American military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region and angles to counter U.S. influence around the world.
Stefanik’s bill would direct the new national AI commission to look at defending the country from such threats and provide recommendations to Trump on how he could organize the federal government to do it.
