While the impact of AI on tech hubs like San Francisco and Boston is already being felt, AI proponents believe it will transform work everywhere, and in every industry. The report uses various proxies for what the researchers call "AI readiness" to document how unevenly this supposed transformation is taking place. Here are four charts to help understand where that could matter. Brookings divides US cities into five categories based on how ready they are to adopt AI-related industries and job offerings. To do so, it looked at local talent pool development, innovations in local institutions, and adoption potential among local companies.

Despite suggestions it has been losing its edge, California is way ahead of others when it comes to the hottest technology right now: artificial intelligence. The regions around San Francisco, San José and Los Angeles are among the best prepped for AI in the country, according to a report released Wednesday by the Brookings Institution. The Washington think tank dubbed the San Francisco and San José metropolitan areas "superstars" when it comes to AI readiness. Three out of the top 10 city regions most ready for AI are in California, according to the report. No other state has more than one region in the top 10.

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may have capped the opening chapter in the Information Wars, where free speech won a small but crucial battle. Full spectrum combat across the digital landscape, however, will only intensify, as a new report from the Brookings Institution, a key player in the censorship industrial complex, demonstrates. Reams of internal documents, known as the Twitter Files, show that social media censorship in recent years was far broader and more systematic than even we critics suspected. Worse, the files exposed deep cooperation – even operational integration – among Twitter and dozens of government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD, CIA, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and, of course, the White House. Government agencies also enlisted a host of academic and non-profit organizations to do their dirty work.

In-brief New rules drafted by the European Union aimed at regulating AI could prevent developers from releasing open-source models, according to American think tank Brookings. The proposed EU AI Act, yet to be signed into law, states that open source developers have to ensure their AI software is accurate, secure, and be transparent about risk and data use in clear technical documentation. Brookings argues that if a private company were to deploy the public model or use it in a product, and it somehow gets in trouble due to some unforeseen or uncontrollable effects from the model, the company would then probably try to blame the open source developers and sue them. It might force the open source community to think twice about releasing their code, and would, unfortunately, mean the development of AI will be driven by private companies. Proprietary code is difficult to analyse and build upon, meaning innovation will be hampered.

The nonpartisan think tank Brookings this week published a piece decrying the bloc's regulation of open source AI, arguing it would create legal liability for general-purpose AI systems while simultaneously undermining their development. Under the EU's draft AI Act, open source developers would have to adhere to guidelines for risk management, data governance, technical documentation and transparency, as well as standards of accuracy and cybersecurity. If a company were to deploy an open source AI system that led to some disastrous outcome, the author asserts, it's not inconceivable the company could attempt to deflect responsibility by suing the open source developers on which they built their product. "This could further concentrate power over the future of AI in large technology companies and prevent research that is critical to the public's understanding of AI," Alex Engler, the analyst at Brookings who published the piece, wrote. "In the end, the [E.U.'s] attempt to regulate open-source could create a convoluted set of requirements that endangers open-source AI contributors, likely without improving use of general-purpose AI."

The rules can be fixed, or they can adjust over time based on, for example, machine learning protocols or human intervention.

… said that “We should stop training radiologists now; it is just completely obvious deep learning is going to do better than radiologists.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have improved rapidly over the past decade, largely driven by advances in machine learning, which is …

On this fifth episode from the Blueprints for American Renewal and Prosperity project, two Brookings experts discuss their blueprints for strengthening governance to meet key international challenges in the technology arena. Senior Fellow Landry Signé is co-author with Stephan Almond of "A blueprint for technology governance in the post-pandemic world," and Senior Fellow Joshua Meltzer is co-author with Cameron Kerry of "Strengthening international cooperation on artificial intelligence." Also on this episode, Senior Fellow David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings, looks at the politics and the economics around raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Listen to this segment on Soundcloud. See below for excerpts from the transcript.

AI is charting new ways to become out of touch, potentially. Maybe the frame of mind around agile, sometimes spontaneous, software development that had been going on in decentralized organizations before AI took over, is coming into conflict with the mindset needed to feed AI systems with a constant high-volume flow of clean, well-structured data. This suggestion was broached by Sylvain Duranton, senior partner at Boston Consulting Group, in a recent TED Talk. "For the last 10 years, many companies have been trying to become less bureaucratic, to have fewer central rules and procedures, more autonomy for their local teams to be more agile. And now they are pushing artificial intelligence, AI, unaware that cool technology might make them more bureaucratic than ever," he stated in a recent account in Forbes.