Lawmakers on the Hill sees a gap in the government's artificial intelligence strategy, so they're filling in. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., published a workforce AI white paper that calls for the rethinking of American education and workforce development in order for the U.S. to keep pace in the global race for AI dominance. The lawmakers worked with the Bipartisan Policy Center to release the paper, which is the first in a series of four. Congressional staff told FedScoop the lawmakers' work is not necessarily in reaction to the White House's but meant to be "complimentary." The white paper was a year in the making after Hurd and Kelly announced their bipartisan collaboration on AI policy to make up for the Trump administration's "woefully underprepared" approach to support American AI development, as Kelly put it.

Increased federal funding and ethical inquiry are needed to best develop America's artificial intelligence capabilities, argued three Duke experts in a congressional briefing on Capitol Hill on Feb. 15. Duke Professors Vincent Conitzer, Nita Farahany and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong spoke broadly about the ethical implications of what the advent of A.I. means for medicine, lethal weapons, automobiles and unemployment. Conitzer's presentation offered a definition of A.I., Sinnott-Armstrong explored the ethics of lethal autonomous weapons and Farahany dove into the legal questions A.I. will challenge. Artificially intelligent systems already excel at games of probability and prediction but fail at games of context and interpretation, said Conitzer in his presentation. This program began a three-part Duke in DC series for congressional staff exploring policy implications for human-A.I. collaboration.