The effective altruism movement, led by RAND CEO Jason Matheny, may challenge Trump's plans for American artificial intelligence dominance through regulatory advocacy.

Jason Matheny is a delight to speak with, provided you're up for a lengthy conversation about potential technological and biomedical catastrophe. Now CEO and president of Rand Corporation, Matheny has built a career out of thinking about such gloomy scenarios. An economist by training with a focus on public health, he dived into the worlds of pharmaceutical development and cultivated meat before turning his attention to national security. As director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, the US intelligence community's research agency, he pushed for more attention to the dangers of biological weapons and badly designed artificial intelligence. In 2021, Matheny was tapped to be President Biden's senior adviser on technology and national security issues.

Just over 15 years ago, Johnny Matheny was diagnosed with fibrosarcoma, a rare form of cancer that attacked the connective tissue around the bones of his left hand. His doctors gave him a choice: Amputate the hand or die. He could still feel his hand after it was gone, a so-called phantom limb caused by signals firing through the nerves that once connected his hand to his brain. Now fully in remission from the cancer, Matheny has spent years volunteering for experiments, test-driving the fanciest, most advanced prosthetics available. But while these devices offered high-tech motor control and vibration feedback, some things were still missing, including the ability to feel temperature.

As businesses, consumers and government agencies look for ways to take advantage of artificial intelligence tools, experts this week called on Congress to craft AI regulations addressing challenges facing the technology. AI concerns run the gamut from bias in algorithms that could affect decisions such as who is selected for housing and employment opportunities, to the use of deep fake AI that can artificially generate images and sounds that can imitate real human beings' appearances and voices. Yet AI has also led to the development of lifesaving drugs, advanced manufacturing and self-driving cars. Indeed, the increased adoption of artificial intelligence has led to the rapid growth of advanced technology in "virtually every sector," said Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Peters spoke during a committee hearing on AI risks and opportunities Wednesday.

Any digital health conference features its share of machine learning evangelism. Technology executives give fervent testimonials about its power to save lives and money, to predict episodes of severe illness, to help hospitals root out inefficiency. This year's gathering of the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Las Vegas was no different. But in between the glowing anecdotes, an aggressive counter narrative emerged: Machine learning needs a watchdog. Throughout the four-day conference, the largest annual event in health care technology, industry leaders called for better ways to evaluate the usefulness of machine learning algorithms, audit them for bias, and put in place regulations designed to ensure reliability, fairness, and transparency.

AI has the potential to improve human lives and a company's bottom line, but it can also accelerate inequality and eliminate jobs during the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression. This dual promise and peril led members of the House Budget Committee to hold a hearing today to discuss the impact of AI on economic recovery, the future of work, and the federal budget. Expert witnesses recommended approaches that ranged from giving people lifelong upskilling accounts to creating regional investment districts and portable benefits. Daron Acemoglu warned the committee about the dangers of excessive automation. The MIT professor and economist recently found that every robot replaces 3.3 human jobs in the U.S. In a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Acemoglu detailed how excessive automation looks for ways to replace workers with machines or algorithms but produces few new jobs.

America's intelligence collectors are already using AI in ways big and small, to scan the news for dangerous developments, send alerts to ships about rapidly changing conditions, and speed up the NSA's regulatory compliance efforts. But before the IC can use AI to its full potential, it must be hardened against attack. The humans who use it -- analysts, policy-makers and leaders -- must better understand how advanced AI systems reach their conclusions. Dean Souleles is working to put AI into practice at different points across the U.S. intelligence community, in line with the ODNI's year-old strategy. The chief technology advisor to the principal deputy to the Director of National Intelligence wasn't allowed to discuss everything that he's doing, but he could talk about a few examples.

The role of artificial intelligence, or machine learning, will be pivotal as the industry wrestles with a gargantuan amount of data that could improve -- or muddle -- health and cost priorities, according to a National Academy of Medicine Special Publication on the use of AI in health care. Yet, the current explosion of investment and development is happening without an underpinning of consensus of responsible, transparent deployment, which potentially constrains its potential. The new report is designed to be a comprehensive reference for organizational leaders, health care professionals, data analysts, model developers and those who are working to integrate machine learning into health care, said Vanderbilt University Medical Center's Michael Matheny, MD, MS, MPH, Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, and co-editor of AI in Healthcare: The Hope, The Hype, The Promise, The Peril. It's critical for the health care community to learn from both the successes, ...

Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) unveiled his artificial intelligence plan last week at a meeting of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. The top Democrat in the U.S. Senate wants the government to create a new agency that would invest an additional $100 billion over 5 years on basic research in artificial intelligence (AI). Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) says the initiative would enable the United States to keep pace with China and Russia in a critical research arena and plug gaps in what U.S. companies are unwilling to finance. The proposal, which Schumer outlined publicly for the first time last week in a speech to senior national security and research policymakers gathered in Washington, D.C., reflects the growing interest in AI and related fields, including a recent presidential executive order. And being the minority leader gives Schumer the chance to turn his ideas into concrete action.

In science fiction and real life alike, there are plenty of horror stories where humans trust artificial intelligence too much. They range from letting the fictional SkyNet control our nuclear weapons to letting Patriots shoot down friendly planes or letting Tesla Autopilot crash into a truck. As conflict on earth, in space, and in cyberspace becomes increasingly fast-paced and complex, the Pentagon's Third Offset initiative is counting on artificial intelligence to help commanders, combatants, and analysts chart a course through chaos -- what we've dubbed the War Algorithm (click here for the full series). But if the software itself is too complex, too opaque, or too unpredictable for its users to understand, they'll just turn it off and do things manually. At least, they'll try: What worked for Luke Skywalker against the first Death Star probably won't work in real life.