Twitter CEO Elon Musk provides insight on the consequences of developing artificial intelligence and the potential impact on elections on "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Congress is under increasing pressure from technology giants and others to find a way to regulate artificial intelligence, and a likely candidate for early action is a bill that both Republicans and Democrats supported in the last Congress under Democrat leadership. In 2022, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), a bill that's aimed at boosting data privacy rights but would also play a big role in regulating emerging AI systems. The ADPPA won almost unanimous support from both parties last year and continues to be supported by companies that are eager to build trust in their AI products, and they believe that a federal regulatory structure will help them get there. BSA/Software Alliance represents dozens of companies, including Microsoft, Okta, Salesforce and others, that build software and AI tools that companies use to run their businesses. BSA is working closely with the committee to get a version of that bill passed this year that it hopes can be approved in a full House vote.

The new institute is one of 11 launched by the National Science Foundation and among two funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture in 2021. It's called the AgAID Institute, which is short for USDA-NIFA Institute for Agricultural AI for Transforming Workforce and Decision Support. While traditional AI development involves scientists making tools and delivering them to end-users, the AgAID Institute will involve the people who will use the AI solutions--from farmers and workers to policy makers--in their development, said Ananth Kalyanaraman, a WSU computer science professor and the lead principal investigator for the Institute. "People are very much part of the agricultural ecosystem. Humans manipulate crops on a daily basis and make complex decisions, such as how to allocate water or mitigate the effects of an incoming storm," said Kalyanaraman, who also holds the Boeing Chair in WSU's School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Under normal circumstances, this tweet wouldn't be so surprising: Lamar Smith, the chair of the committee since 2013, is a well-known climate-change denier. But these are not normal times. The tweet is best interpreted as something new: a warning shot. It's a sign of things to come--a declaration of the Trump Administration's intent to sideline science. In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that "to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."