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Trump Administration Unveils Order To Prioritize and Promote AI (reuters.com) 128

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday will sign an executive order asking federal government agencies to dedicate more resources and investment into research, promotion and training on artificial intelligence (AI), Reuters reports, citing a senior administration official said. From the report: Under the American AI Initiative, the administration will direct agencies to prioritize AI investments in research and development, increase access to federal data and models for that research and prepare workers to adapt to the era of AI. There was no specific funding announced for the initiative, the administration official said on a conference call, adding that it called for better reporting and tracking of spending on AI-related research and development. The initiative aims to make sure the United States keeps its research and development advantage in AI and related areas, such as advanced manufacturing and quantum computing. Trump, in his State of the Union speech last week, said he was willing to work with lawmakers to deliver new and important infrastructure investment, including investments in the cutting-edge industries of the future, calling it a "necessity."
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Trump Administration Unveils Order To Prioritize and Promote AI More

Trump Administration Unveils Order To Prioritize and Promote AI

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  • Ahh I see (Score:2, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 )
    Now I know what all the "AI" hype articles were for: grabbing taxpayer money. How original.
    • and to think that some people still use dial up / pen & paper.

    • They are looking for any intelligence in the government. This is nowadays a complex undertaking. You need very sensitive equipment to measure that. Also artificial intelligence would be helpful to supplement natural intelligence.

  • Great, let's jump on the buzzword bandwagon.

    I though that DT was above all that: he made his own buzzwords, instead of repeating somebody else's.

    • Nerd stuff... Whatever, sign the paper. Just don't mention that a bulk of AI research is done in China.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by RedK ( 112790 )

      Great, let's jump on the buzzword bandwagon.
      I though that DT was above all that: he made his own buzzwords, instead of repeating somebody else's.

      - "Hey guys, I think we need to invest in AI research. From machine learning to powerful neural networks that can replicate portions of the human conscience!" says Slashdot and industry pundits alike.

      - "Good, we'll make HEWWWGE AI, Powerful AI. Thinking machines. You know they have those now ? Machines that think! It's crazy. We'll build more, they'll be better, the GREATEST artificial brains!" says President Honorary Doctor Donald J. Trump.

      - "NO ! AI is awful! ORANGE MAN BAD!" replies Slashdot and i

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by penandpaper ( 2463226 )

        President Honorary Doctor

        His title is God Emperor and he just conquered Italy [youtube.com].

      • I mean, AI is a neutral thing. It is neither good, nor bad.

        By that, I mean, it's a tool. Whether or not it's a good thing or bad thing depends on who's using it and your point of view of the person using it. I'm somewhat uncomfortable that AIs are being trained to increase engagement on social media platforms, essentially we're training AI models and using them to make people more addicted to social media. But, at the same time, AI is also used for spam detection, fraud detection, etc.

        So, saying that you do

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by RedK ( 112790 )

          So, saying that you don't want the "ORANGE MAN" to have access to powerful AIs is not unreasonable if you don't like "ORANGE MAN", or mistrust what they would do with it.

          Look at pretty much the entirety of the comments under this post. None of it discusses "ORANGE MAN! shouldn't have access to AI because of X/Y moral dilema", all of it makes fun of him with little substance beyond "ORANGE MAN BAD!". That is full blown TDS.

          Honestly, to say you don't want "ORANGE MAN!" to have access to AI is saying you don't want government in general to use AI. Like it or not : President Trump is the POTUS. Any power he has, all Presidents have. To deny him something means denying it f

          • I do believe that there should be serious discussions on when and where AI can be used by companies, individuals and the government - as well as what data that AI is allowed to use.

            A good example would be facial recognition systems. Companies keep data in facial recognition databases for their own purposes (eg. recognizing shoplifters, troublemakers, etc.). It's worth discussing the ethical implications of that, and potentially regulating the usage of this information. Same thing goes for Law Enforcement us

          • So, I am looking at the entirety of comments under this post, and it seems to be making fun of his marketing, not his intentions. At this point, not even the obligatory AC shitposters have chimed in with anything. I believe TDS is a real thing, but it only seems to effect those who feel the need to loudly defend him. Have you thought about... you know... not being a reactionary hysteric?

        • I mean, AI is a neutral thing. It is neither good, nor bad.

          By that, I mean, it's a tool. Whether or not it's a good thing or bad thing depends on who's using it and your point of view of the person using it.

          Not only that, but the term A.I. has begun to mean so many different things that saying "I want to spend money on AI" is rather an empty statement unless you specify "what kind of AI".

          Are they looking for self-learning, are they looking for sentient machines, or are they talking about computer algorithms? Mass media has blurred exactly what is meant by A.I. now.

    • "I though that DT was above all that: he made his own buzzwords, instead of repeating somebody else's."

      Who told you that? Lock her up, drain the swamp, and build a wall were all someone else's ideas. The only trumpism which was actually his idea was bigly.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      For a mere Executive Order, he doesn't stress his orange brain over new buzzwords. This order has all the effect declaring that from now on, the Sun shall rise in the East and set in the West...just as long as the alt-right is okay with that.

  • Unintended consequences (Score:3)

    by DanDD ( 1857066 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @09:56AM (#58103456)

    Maybe in an upcoming election we'll have the choice of voting for an AI president, instead of other worse & universally poor options....

    • Maybe in an upcoming election we'll have the choice of voting for an AI president, instead of other worse & universally poor options....

      I like that idea. IBM Watson has a debater feature:

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/c... [forbes.com]

      Let's demand that our worse & universally poor options debate against IBM Watson Debater!

      Of course, IBM will admit that Watson isn't really true AI.

      But our worse & universally poor options aren't really true presidential candidates either.

  • I'm sure this idea has been novelized already: Earth is being conquered by a lone interstellar AI. Distances make sending complex life between stars impractical, but a machine is more feasible. Berserker seeds, not berserkers. Only Earth's tech won't support more AIs, so it has to guide us...

    • Contact touched on this. "Aliens detect us, fax down plans, we suckers build the thing and blow ourselves to kingdom come."

      There's a novel where people discover a thing like a 2 foot football and, when polishing it, see it's a crystal...with creatures inside staring back.

      They can communicate and have advanced tech and all they ask is Earth make more crystals and shoot them into the stars.

      Then a second is found, slightly different, and they both warn Earth the other is a dangerous liar.

      Fun ensues.

  • The Trump Administration is desperately seeking artificial intelligence due to the total absence of any natural intelligence.

    • Automation cost more jobs in the last decade than immigrants or outsourcing and it is a trend that will continue according to UBS... who in only interested in long term investing.

      GOOD that Trump is clueless about how much of a job killer this will be; especially for his base. IT people will not like being hated more than immigrants.

      NOTE: Canada is #1 in AI because the smart people left for Canada during Bush's crimes, properly recognizing the terminal cancer in America's body politic; Trump is just a bigge

      • Technology creates jobs (Score:2, Informative)

        by sjbe ( 173966 )

        Automation cost more jobs in the last decade than immigrants or outsourcing and it is a trend that will continue according to UBS... who in only interested in long term investing.

        A) Immigrants demonstrably do not cost jobs. The US is a nation of immigrants and always has been. If immigrants cost jobs our nation would have failed long ago. In fact immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate share of successful new companies and job creation [forbes.com].
        B) Automation creates jobs. This computer you are using right at this moment is nothing more than automation. Our entire technology sector did not even exist 70 years ago. The internet as we know it today simply did not exist prior to

        • Re:Technology creates jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:00AM (#58103866) Homepage Journal

          " The jobs are different jobs but there are more of them in the end. Some people do have trouble with the changes but the economic gains by people at all levels of the economy at the end are indisputable."

          I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think crystal balls are cloudy in this area. The computers are now becoming capable of performing service jobs, which is where people went when automation reduced manufacturing jobs. As well, the workers' share of profits has been declining for decades, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, so that final point is extremely disputable.

          What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

          • What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

            Learn to code?

          • Automation will not elminiate all jobs (Score:4, Insightful)

            by sjbe ( 173966 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:35AM (#58104134)

            I agree with the rest of your comment, but I think crystal balls are cloudy in this area. The computers are now becoming capable of performing service jobs, which is where people went when automation reduced manufacturing jobs.

            I work in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs have not been reduced the way many people think. Some have been relocated. There are more manufacturing jobs than ever globally. What has changed in the US is that labor intensive products are not built in countries with low labor costs. Capital intensive products are built in the US. The US has a $3 Trillion manufacturing sector. The total number of manufacturing jobs in the US is about the same as it was at the start of WWII [wikipedia.org]. It's down from the peak numbers in the 1970s but still accounts for around 13 million people and holding. The percent of the jobs in the economy has fallen but that's largely because the other sectors grew while manufacturing jobs stayed steady.

            As well, the workers' share of profits has been declining for decades, and wages aren't keeping up with inflation, so that final point is extremely disputable.

            That depends on exactly how you measure it and which jobs you are measuring. Just because someone has a smaller piece of the pie doesn't mean they are worse off if the pie overall grew. And the evidence is clear that the pie has grown. Sure you can find some periods where the data shows a decline but I can show you hundreds of years of data showing a very steady increase. Yes there are some serious income inequality issues going on but that isn't proof of some irreversible decline in employment thanks to automation. Don't conflate the two issues.

            What exactly do the humans do when robots do the service jobs?

            Several answers to that.
            1) Robots do not and will not do all the service jobs. Automation does not solve every problem because it is not economical to automate everywhere. People naively extrapolate automation trends to infinity without really understanding what is going on. It's too expensive to automate problem and automation creates new jobs that cannot yet be automated. 70 years ago secretarial pools were a common thing. Today they are unheard of and yet we still have full employment.
            2) We have no idea what jobs will be created by further advances in automation. We never have known and cannot know. I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and if anyone claims they predicted what it would do and the huge economic impact it has had is lying. We dreamed about such things but had absolutely no idea what form it would actually take or what jobs it would involve. The jobs people will be doing in 50 years are hard to imagine today. Some will be the same but many haven't even been invented yet.
            3) Humans control legislatures and can easily regulate automation in places should it become necessary.
            4) The amount of economically valuable work that can be done is effectively infinite and our resources to automate are finite. Automation can sometimes depress wages but it doesn't eliminate them altogether. Some things that are currently impossible become economically achievable as automation makes it possible for people to address those problems.

            • > What has changed in the US is that labor intensive products are not built in countries with low labor costs.

              I'm pretty sure you meant "... are now built in countries ..." Not so subtle difference in meaning. ;)

              Pretty interesting comments about the status of manufacturing in the US. I suspect you are correct.

              > 3) Humans control legislatures and can easily regulate automation in places should it become necessary.

              I'd be concerned about that, particularly in light of the previous answer. Legislatures ar

            • Pretty much this entire post supposes that you know the limit of future automation technology. It may not be soon, but there may well be cheap programs in the future that can take over pretty much everything a human is good at. Amazon echo is a crude first step in eliminating a huge number of those service jobs to which you refer. The cost of technology has a very consistent pattern of coming down. The power and versatility of technology has a very consistent trend of increasing.

              Human capability, howeve

            • Today they are unheard of and yet we still have full employment.

              What? Who told you that?

        • Re:Technology creates jobs (Score:5, Insightful)

          by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:07AM (#58103924) Homepage Journal

          It'd be more accurate to say automation creates some jobs and destroys others. For example "computer" used to be a human job title. Large companies before computers employed massive accounting departments, the majority of people in them were responsible for performing and checking arithmetic all day.

          Introducing computers eliminated the jobs where you add up columns of numbers, but it allowed the creation of new jobs analyzing data. AI has the promise to replace some analytical jobs in the future, and it is likely in the short term that as computers take over the low hanging fruit, those analysts will be focused on tasks computers aren't good at yet. However you shouldn't expect that trend to continue indefinitely.

          You can't just draw a straight line across a past trend and extrapolate it indefinitely. There are step discontinuities and changing circumstances in the future. One of the concerns you should have is the growing trend of income stagnation. This has effected people in the lower two income quartiles since the 80s, as median income has shown no growth at all even as *average* income has continued it's steady post WW2 rise. It's clear that the new, higher paying jobs created don't always go to the people losing jobs, and as automation gets more sophisticated we're going to see the line of stagnation rise higher up the social strata.

        • but they can and will lower pay in many industries. That's just supply and demand. It's a double edge sword.

          Automation does _not_ create jobs. Instead new jobs are created to replace the jobs that were destroyed. This is not the same thing. And it's a slower process than folks realize.

          Outsourcing doesn't send work where it's efficient, it sends it where it's _cheapest_. This is why you have tariffs. You need to level the playing field when another country is willing to abuse it's workforce or you en

          • I should add (Score:4, Informative)

            by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @01:05PM (#58104686)
            the solution isn't necessarily to stop immigration. The solution is to make sure that the wealth immigrants generate makes it to everyone.

            Right now the money made from immigration goes to the top. At least in America. We don't have Single Payer healthcare, we have very few social services and we pay taxes that, if you count your company's healthcare as a tax (and you should, what else would you call it) we pay as much or more as anyone on Europe.

            A huge part of the tension from immigration isn't just the occasional racist, it's that immigrants lower wages by increasing supply while improving a sector of the economy (the stock market) that doesn't affect the people who's wages are going down. Remember, only about 20% of Americans own stock, even if you include 401ks as "owning stock"....

            This is why we need a New New Deal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      If I ever got a mod point to give, I'd have "invested" one in that. However, if you were looking for the uncertain state between insight and funny you would have needed something about the war between natural stupidity and artificial intelligence.

      Still not sure it applies to #PresidentTweety. I can't believe that anyone can become that stupid without a whole lot of effort. The ignorance might be natural, but it takes real effort to build such a monumental stupidity on top. Yes, some things have continued to

  • "So we had to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It is a huge problem. I have a son—he’s 10 years old. He has computers. He is so good with these computers. It’s unbelievable. The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough. And maybe, it's hardly doable. But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing. But that’s true throughout our whole governmental society. We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester. And certainly cyber is one of them."

  • how about robotics as well? (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @10:46AM (#58103726) Journal
    Seriously, Robotics, AI, and Space are exactly where we need major pushes.

  • artificial insemination (Score:3)

    by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @11:06AM (#58103912)

    I don't know if artificial insemination would lead to fewer clandestine arrangements with David Pecker or not.

    Sure hope the president was fully apprised, or he might discover to his chagrin that AI is not the end all it's cracked up to be.

  • So in aviation, and I think similar in medical, we have to prove that our tests cover a sufficient amount of the code to show it is astonishingly rare to have the code do something it shouldn't. How practical is this kind of testing with AI systems?

    • Since an AI is effectively a magical black box, that kind of testing isn't really practical at all. It would more than likely have to go through some kind of examination process like we do for people who work in important jobs.

  • Does he know what intelligence is? Artificial or otherwise?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Sure he does. He claims that nuclear power is so advanced you need to be Einstein to understand it. Hence he wanted the Navy to jettison the new electric catapults for launching planes off air craft carriers and replace them with the old steam powered catapults. That's some fancy intelligence right there. I just hope some advisor doesn't get a woodie for sails.

      • Hence he wanted the Navy to jettison the new electric catapults for launching planes off air craft carriers and replace them with the old steam powered catapults.

        Maybe he thought the steam powered catapults used coal?

      • replace them with the old steam powered catapults.

        ... with the steam generated by burning naturally clean coal. Progress, Republican style.

  • AI? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Creedo ( 548980 ) on Monday February 11, 2019 @12:39PM (#58104514) Journal
    I'd settle for some sign of HI (Human Intelligence) from this administration.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Pitawg ( 85077 )

      That is no way to talk. We totally need Alternative Intelligence to be a priority right now.

  • Amazing. Now we can finally start working on this AI thing. I was getting worried.

  • Any so-called 'AI' that is developed because of this 'prioritization' will be smarter than Trump himself is by at least a full order of magnitude.
    For purposes of contrast, a 'Trump AI' could easily be implemented in an interpreted BASIC version of ELIZA.

  • ...on a daily basis, I cannot deny realizing the damage AI is going to cause. The AI sales pitches are no different than teh sales pitches of computing when computers were first introduced to the public and that is enough to know, the AI fails are going to follow.

  • I can see this working out well for the Trump administration, with changes for the better occurring almost right away. After all, I've got a microwave oven that has a ten-point IQ advantage on the current president.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Locke2005 ( 849178 )
      That's nothing, my dog has a 30 point IQ advantage on the dotard! Too bad she's not old enough to run for president!
  • They are finally giving Al Gore the credit he deserves for inventing the internet! Oh wait... I might have misread one of those letters...
  • When the government is so desperately short on the natural variety, I'll vote for artificial intelligence every time.

    Colossus 2020!!!
    https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

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