Policymakers should focus on turning AI aspirations into reality

With policymakers often focused on the risks of artificial intelligence (AI), the White House-sponsored AI Aspirations conference earlier this month provided a welcome alternative as a range of government officials took the stage to outline an optimistic vision of how AI can drive progress across sectors. The wide range of topics covered at the conference—including health, education, transportation, energy, and weather—demonstrated the potential for the public sector to solve important societal challenges with AI. As awareness of AI’s potential benefits grows, it’s time for the federal government to create a national AI deployment strategy to accelerate its adoption.

Many government officials at the conference emphasized that AI is an important tool that can help solve key problems across many sectors, including:

• Education: U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona discussed how teachers can implement AI in the classroom to improve student achievement. Teachers can use AI in their classrooms to tutor students, create lesson plans, generate high-quality, engaging reading material, reinforce learning at home, and even relieve them of time-consuming administrative tasks.
• Net:AI can have a powerful impact on the power grid, for example by anticipating increases in demand and predicting and mitigating risks, such as weather events that could cause power outages. In addition, AI can help expand the power grid quickly, sustainably and reliably, which will be necessary to meet the growing power demand of electric vehicles.
• Transport: Cities can use AI to predict high-risk traffic accident hotspots and improve safety. These types of “smart city” applications could improve the quality of life for residents in cities and communities across America.
• Semiconductors:Dana Weinstein of the Office of Science and Technology Policy noted that in the next few years, AI could be used to design new and more sustainable semiconductor chips, which would greatly accelerate development.
• Government Services: Shalonda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, discussed how government can adopt AI to improve customer service. For example, AI chatbots can provide users with accurate information, making government more accessible to the public and reducing bureaucracy.
• Response to disaster:The government is predicting an increase in “billion-dollar disasters” in the coming years. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) can use AI to make faster, more accurate predictions to better prepare for and respond to potentially catastrophic weather events, which could help save lives and protect property. AI can also help streamline the aid process and improve interagency operationalization of disaster relief.

AI Aspirations provided vivid examples of the enormous potential for AI to transform every sector of our economy and the way government delivers services. This kind of grand vision of how AI can improve the country is a necessary step to building support for greater AI adoption. As Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo noted during her keynote, the government must achieve “the right balance between minimizing risk and maximizing (AI) benefits.” President Biden’s executive order on AI last year kicked off a government-wide effort to advance and leverage AI in the United States, but policymakers shouldn’t rest on their laurels.

The most important question for policymakers is no longer whether AI matters, but how best to enable this progress. Adopting AI in the United States, especially in key economic sectors such as health care, education, transportation, and government, will require policymakers to work closely with industry. Creating a national AI roadmap that identifies sectoral opportunities and barriers, as well as a detailed strategy for achieving widespread AI adoption in each of these sectors, should be a top priority for the next administration and Congress.