The White House Call for AI Comments
What are the providers telling us and what are they not?
With Miroslaw Manicki
The results are dribbling in. The White House recently asked for comments from any and all individuals and organizations. They did this through a unit of the U. S. Department of Commerce, the National National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
The request was closed out on June 14. Since then, we have gathered the commentary together in is various forms. It drew in open commentary as well as formal documentation provided by 1,268 individuals and 177 organizations. Of these were comments from twelve corporate nd open source AI providers. This included Hitachi, IBM, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, OpenMIC, Adobe, Intel, Palantir, NEC, and some Mozilla projects.
An analysis of comments by AI providers can be seen below. It results from machine-based analysis of concepts covered in their twelve submissions. Of the 901 total identified subject references of the top sixteen areas, 281 of them — 31.2% of the total — represented accountability, regulation, and responsibility.
What is on their minds? The fifteenth thing on the list is innovation. That may well be the only positive item. Between accountability, regulation, and responsibility, it looks like they are largely concerned with who will be held responsible for what AI brings. An underlying theme perhaps — not them.
This is indeed an odd way to introduce a new product to market. Imagine AI as a new food product. Would the general public likely want to eat it in the face of such publicly-stated concerns of providers? What if the product were a kind of vehicle — which arguably AI partially is — would many want to ride in such vehicles if vendors were so assiduous on this point?
The discussion is underway by White House leadership and others, principally but not exclusively in the United States and Europe. As seen in our submission “AI Comments: Leveraging the Global Knowledge Corpus, One Way or Another” we see that the AI question is in fact a subset of a more important discussion on knowledge and how it may be better supported, more effectively prepared for digital and process-based implementation, and extended to general use via networked and digital capacity.
It can be found here: