Artificial Intelligence for the American People

The United States has long been a champion and defender of the core values of freedom, guarantees of human rights, the rule of law, stability in our institutions, rights to privacy, respect for intellectual property, and opportunities to all to pursue their dreams. The AI technologies we develop must also reflect these fundamental American values and our devotion to helping people. Our goal is to ensure that AI technologies are understandable, trustworthy, robust, and safe. In addition, the broader impacts of AI on society must be considered, including implications for the workforce and assurances that AI will be developed responsibly. The United States is actively addressing these challenges through R&D programs and engagement with the broad stakeholder communities, including international discussions on AI development. As part of the American AI Initiative, Federal agencies will foster public trust in AI systems by establishing guidance for AI development and use across different types of technology and industrial sectors. In addition to the national strategy, the White House in January 2020 proposed guidance for the regulation of AI applications, which will help Federal regulatory agencies develop and maintain approaches for the safe and trustworthy creation and adoption of new AI technologies without stifling innovation.

As new AI technologies are created, we must also increase our understanding of how AI systems derive solutions, and why they make the decisions they make. An important R&D emphasis is on providing AI with explainability mechanisms that help human users understand reasons for AI outputs. DARPA’s Explainable AI (XAI) program aims to create machine learning techniques that produce more explainable solutions while maintaining high performance and appropriate levels of trust in the system. NSF’s Program on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence in Collaboration with Amazon will fund research on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society.

Robust and safe AI

The complexity of many AI systems creates important safety and security challenges that must be addressed to ensure that these systems are trustworthy. In particular, AI systems have some inherent cybersecurity risks because of the characteristics of how the technology is designed. R&D investments such as DARPA’s AI Next Campaign will create solutions for countering adversarial attacks on AI technologies, such as those that attempt to contaminate training data, modify algorithms, create adversarial inputs, or exploit flaws in AI system goals. This research is expected to lead to more secure, robust, and safe AI systems that are reliable and trustworthy.

Workforce impacts

Rapid progress in the development of AI technologies has many potential benefits, including the creation of new industries and occupations, increased opportunities for innovation, and increased productivity. However, these technologies are changing the nature of work, and have caused some concerns about the possibility of lost jobs, or the mismatch between available occupations and the skills of the workforce. Our strategy for AI and the American Worker provides educational and training opportunities that help the workforce thrive in the new economy. Beyond the immediate educational need, however, is the need to look forward to better understand the changing landscape of jobs and work. NSF is responding to this need by focusing R&D on convergent research on The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier. This research will help us better understand the human-technology partnership and the emerging socio-technological landscape, create new technologies to augment human performance, and foster livelong and pervasive learning with technology.