As lawmakers consider the impact artificial intelligence will have on America's workforce, experts across the government, industry and academia this week urged Congress to confront and prioritize issues around ethics, bias and the increasing interactions between humans and robots. "Thanks to AI some weird and wonderful things are beginning to happen: Cars are learning to drive themselves, machines can now recognize your friends' faces and when you see people walking down the street talking on their phones, you don't know if they're talking to another human, or to a machine and expecting the machine to answer," Erik Brynjolfsson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy said at a House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing in Washington. "Just last week, [the smart assistant] Siri tried to join into a conversation I was having about interest rates." Brynjolfsson researches the impacts that emerging information technologies have on business strategies and productivity. When prompted by a question from committee Chairwoman Haley Stevens, D-Mich., he described how considerations around ethics and bias are becoming more and more urgent as AI rapidly advances.