Obama: Successor will oversee AI transformation
President Obama believes that AI will be a key issue for his successor, given the current introduction of self-driving vehicles. The White House believes that AI will have a positive impact, improving traffic systems, making medical diagnoses more accurate and protecting wildlife. However, as AI may cause job losses due to the automation of workplaces, the White House believes that future presidents will need to shape how AI evolves to protect workers. Future presidents will also need to ensure that AI progress does not stall; the current government has provided funding for research into machine learning techniques to find the next big breakthrough.

“A huge percentage of the American population makes its living, and often a pretty good living, driving,” Obama said. “So understandably people are concerned about what this is going to mean.”

A report on the future of AI published by the White House this week listed many areas of society and the economy that will be transformed by smarter software. Although positive about the technology’s benefits, the report also discusses potential drawbacks: robotics might displace workers, for example, or algorithms used in policing might exhibit bias. The report calls for more public discussion and engagement from policy makers on problems like those.

The Pittsburgh conference mostly highlighted ways in which AI is likely to have a positive impact. Researchers talked about using machine learning to build intelligent traffic systems, improve medical diagnoses, and protect wildlife.

But panel discussions, and hallway conversations between sessions, often turned to challenges that the government will face, including job losses. Given the prominence of debates about jobs in the current presidential race, the role of AI in shaping the labor market could become a major political issue.

The White House signaled that it believes future presidents should try to shape how AI technology evolves and is deployed, but it also conceded that it’s unclear how to do that. “This is an inflection point,” said White House chief of staff Denis McDonough, who moderated a panel on the challenges in AI. “[Current progress] will either keep going or crap out if we don’t handle it correctly.”

Academic and corporate researchers at the event who work on AI technologies generally agreed that recent developments suggested big, if unknown, changes for workplaces. Economists remain unsure about the extent to which AI and automation will eradicate jobs or increase inequality (see “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs” and “Who Will Own the Robots?”).

“Every industrial age has experienced disruption; this will be the same,” said Guruduth Banavar, vice president of cognitive computing at IBM. However, Banavar and others also argued that some AI systems will enter the workforce as coworkers to humans, not replacements. Many people will collaborate with machine-learning algorithms, said Banavar: “People have to learn from the get-go that learning machines are part of their everyday.”

Jeannette Wing, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, said that the company is already changing in response to the increased power of machine learning. She predicted that all types of companies would have to adjust, requiring big changes in the skills needed in the workforce. “Other fields are going to have to figure out what they should be training people in,” she said.