White House Keys on Technology at Second Democracy Summit – MeriTalk

[ad_1]

During the second US Democracy Summit held in Washington, DC this week, the White House highlighted key steps the Biden-Harris administration has taken to foster innovation in emerging technologies, as well as unveiled a number of new initiatives to continue building on his work.

White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director Arati Prabhakar announced the actions the federal government will take both to hand over the power of these new technologies and to mitigate their risks.

“President Biden often says that we have to prove that democracy works in the 21st century,” Prabhakar said during the third day of the summit held at the Washington Convention Center in downtown DC. “Science, technology and innovation are essential for this task, because this is how we open the doors to go beyond today’s limits towards a different tomorrow, towards a better tomorrow”.

“We live in an age of rapid technological innovation,” he continued, adding “Artificial intelligence (AI), biological technologies, new energy technologies, advances in social sciences. Each of these carries extraordinary potential and extraordinary risks.

The OSTP director began explaining the age-old dilemma of the technology’s “raw” power, explaining that history shows it has been used “for both good and evil.”

“AI is the most powerful technology of our time,” he explained. “To reap its benefits, we need to start by addressing its risks.”

Myriads of new initiatives

Prabhakar said that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has launched its Trustworthy and Responsible AI Resource Center for Risk Management after the unveiling of its AI Risk Management Framework.

The online resource center will be a central hub for AI creators to access background content, technical documents and toolkits to enable responsible development and use of the technology, Prabhakar said. The website will include standards, measurement methods, metrics and datasets.

OSTP also launched its national strategy to promote data sharing and analytics to preserve privacy during the summit.

“The most interesting data in the world is about people. And that also makes it the most dangerous data in the world,” Prabhakar said. “This strategy is a roadmap for using privacy-enhancing technologies to overcome this dilemma.”

The agency also launched the National Goals for Digital Resources Research and Development, which outline its priorities for responsible research and development of digital resources. These goals will help digital asset developers better enforce democratic principles and protect consumers by default, the White House said.

Days before the start of the Democracy Summit, President Biden signed an executive order prohibiting the government’s operational use of commercial spyware when it poses significant security risks or significant risks of misuse by a foreign government.

The State Department joined 44 other nation-states in passing new guiding principles on the government’s use of surveillance technologies. These principles outline how governments can respect democratic values ​​and protect human rights by leveraging surveillance technologies.

The principles are intended to prevent the misuse of surveillance technologies by governments to allow human rights violations in the use of Internet controls; associate video surveillance with tools based on artificial intelligence; and the use of big data analytics tools.

Building on past politics

All of these initiatives, Prabhakar said, build on recent actions the federal government has taken, following “implementing a series of challenges to advance democracy-affirming technologies.”

During his March 30 speech, Prabhakar specifically highlighted the OSTP project for an AI Bill of Rights, NIST’s AI Risk Management Framework, the White House’s AI National Research Resource, and the executive order from President Biden promoting data equity.

“As democracies, we have a great opportunity and a great responsibility to develop and use emerging technologies to reinforce our most important values,” he said. “Answers to the immense problems we face are not one-size-fits-all: they have to be adapted to the local context.”

[ad_2]