Harvard researchers want to school Congress about AI

When Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Congress, technology experts quickly realized how poorly informed his questioners were. As much as Congress wanted to regulate the tech behemoth, it was clear they had no idea how. Instead, they let him get away with grandiose claims about how AI would solve all the company's problems. For Dipayan Ghosh, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), the hearing emphasized the pressing need to bring US policymakers up to speed on major technology issues--and AI in particular. "AI is a tremendous technology, but there are really salient problems that we've seen take a life of their own in society," says Ghosh, who was a technology policy advisor in the Obama administration.