The White House Considers Artificial Intelligence an Important Policy Issue.

The White House is going to spend the summer researching how the government should deal with artificial intelligence. When you consider that we’ve got drones flying everywhere, robots automating jobs out of existence, and self-driving cars right around the corner, it’s about time.

The administration is pitching its new AI research program as an “interagency working group” that will “learn more about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence,” which is a welcome move—researchers in the field have been calling for a “Federal Robotics Commission” for the last couple years, and this at least looks like a small step toward that future.

With companies like Google, Uber, and Tesla getting close to wanting to put self-driving cars on the road, drone companies hoping to begin to automate the devices, and AI-driven software taking jobs left and right, it's clear AI is going to have a significant impact on our society. AI is going to continue to make everything a lot more seamless, which is great, but we're also probably going to have to start thinking about things like a basic income for people whose jobs are automated away.

To start, the White House is going to hold a series of workshops over the summer that will consider things like artificial intelligence safety and the expected effect of AI on the jobs market. Judging from the announcement, the administration is going to spend lots of time talking about how to regulate self-driving cars, drones, and worker robots, but I’m personally excited to see whether or not the White House thinks it’s time to consider the potentially catastrophic implications of robotic super intelligence.

“AI systems can also behave in surprising ways, and we’re increasingly relying on AI to advise decisions and operate physical and virtual machinery—adding to the challenge of predicting and controlling how complex technologies will behave,” Deputy US Chief Technology Officer Ed Felten wrote in the announcement.

Ryan Calo, a University of Washington School of Law professor who proposed the Federal Robotics Commission in 2014, told me at the time that the government has little idea what it’s doing when it comes to automation and AI, which has created a “patchwork” of “hopelessly piecemeal regulations.”

“Agencies, courts, and others are not in conversation with one another,” he wrote in a paper proposing the commission. “Even the same government entities fail to draw links across similar technologies; drones come up little in discussion of driverless cars despite presenting similar issues of safety, privacy, and psychological unease.”