The Biden Administration Tackles AI Regulation—Sort Of

 

In our three-branch system of government, the power of any one branch is intentionally limited so that the democratic exercise of the public will cannot be thwarted by any one branch going amok.  This division of power leads to inefficiency and sometimes confusion, but it also means that the damage done by any one branch—executive, legislative, or judicial—is limited compared to what a unified dictatorship could do.

 

We're seeing the consequences of this division in the recent executive order announced by the Biden administration on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI).  One take on the fact sheet that preceded the 63-page order itself appeared on the website of IEEE Spectrum, a general-interest magazine for members of IEEE, the largest organization of professional engineers in the world. 

 

It's interesting that reactions from most of the technically-informed people interviewed by the Spectrum editor were guardedly positive.  Lee Tiedrich, a distinguished faculty fellow at Duke University's Initiative for Science and Society, said ". . . the White House has done a really good, really comprehensive job."  She thinks that while respecting the limitations of executive-branch power, the order addresses a wide variety of issues with calls to a number of Federal agencies to take actions that could make a positive difference.

 

For example, the order charges the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with developing standards for "red-team" testing of AI products for safety before public release.  Red-team testing involves purposefully trying to do malign things with a product to see how bad the results can get.  Although NIST doesn't have to do the testing itself, coming up with rigorous standards for such testing in the manifold different circumstances that AI is being used for may prove to be a challenge that exceeds the organization's current capability.  Nevertheless, you don't get what you don't ask for, and as a creature of the executive branch, NIST is obliged at least to try.

 

The U. S. Department of Commerce will develop per this order "guidance for content authentication and watermarking to clearly label AI-generated content."  Cynthia Rudin, a Duke professor of computer science, sees that some difficulty may arise when the question of watermarking AI-generated text comes up.  Her point seems to be that such watermarking is hard to imagine other than seeing (NOTE:  AI-GENERATED TEXT) inserted every so often in a paragraph, which would be annoying, to say the least.  (You have my guarantee that not one word of this blog is AI-generated, by the way.)

 

Other experts are concerned about the use of data sets for training AI-systems, especially the intimidatingly-named "foundational AI" ones that are used as a basis for other systems with more specific roles.  Many training data sets include a substantial fraction of worldwide Internet content, including millions of copyrighted documents, and concern has been raised about how copyrighted data is being exploited by AI systems without remuneration to the copyright holders.  Susan Ariel Aaronson of George Washington University hopes that Congress will take more definite action in this area to go beyond the largely advisory effect that Biden's executive order will have.

 

This order shares in common with other recent executive orders a tendency to spread responsibilities widely among many disparate agencies, a feature that is something of a hallmark of this administration.  On the one hand, this type of approach is good at addressing an issue that has multiple embodiments or aspects, which is certainly true of AI.  Everything from realistic-looking deepfake photos, to genuine-sounding legal briefs, to functioning computer code has been generated by AI, and so this broad-spectrum approach is an appropriate one for this case.

 

On the other hand, such a widely-spread initiative risks getting buried in the flood of other obligations and tasks that executive agencies have to deal with, ranging from their primary purposes (NIST must establish measurement standards; the Department of Commerce must deal with commerce, etc.) and other initiatives such as banning workplace discrimination against LGBT employees, one of the things that Biden issued an executive order for in his first day of office.  This is partly a matter of publicity and public perception, and partly a question of priorities that the various officials in charge of the various agencies set.  With the growing number of Federal employees, it's an open question as to what administrative bang the taxpayer is getting for his buck.  Regulation of AI is something that there is widespread agreement on—the extreme-case dangers have become clearer in recent months and years, and nobody wants AI to take over the government or the power grid and start treating us all like lab rats that the AI owner has no particular use for anymore. 

 

But how to avoid both the direst scenarios, as well as the shorter-term milder drawbacks that AI has already given rise to, is a thorny question, and the executive order will only go a short distance toward that goal.

 

One nagging aspect of AI regulation is the fact that the new large-scale "generative AI" systems trained on vast swathes of the Internet are starting to do things that even their developers didn't anticipate:  learning languages that the programmers hadn't intended the system to learn, for example.  One possible factor in this uncontrollability aspect of AI that no one in government seems to have considered, at least out loud, is dwelled on at length by Paul Kingsnorth, an Irish novelist and essayist who wrote "AI Demonic" in the November/December issue of Touchstone magazine.  Kingsnorth seriously considers the possibility that certain forms and embodiments of AI are being influenced by a "spiritual personification of the age of the Machine" which he calls Ahriman. 

 

The name Ahriman is associated with a Zoroastrian evil spirit of destruction, but Kingsnorth describes how it was taken up by the theosophist Rudolf Steiner, and then an obscure computer scientist named David Black who testified to feeling "drained" by his work with computers back in the 1980s.  The whole article should be read, as it's not easy to summarize in a few sentences.  But Kingsnorth's basic point is clear:  in trying to regulate AI, we may be dealing with something more than just piles of hardware and programs.  As St. Paul says in Ephesians 6:12, ". . . we wrestle not against flesh and blood [and server farms], but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." 

 

Anyone trying to regulate AI would be well advised to take the spiritual aspect of the struggle into account as well.

 

Sources:  The IEEE Spectrum website carried the article by Eliza Strickland, "What You Need to Know About Biden's Sweeping AI Order" at https://spectrum.ieee.org/biden-ai-executive-order.  I also referred to an article on AI on the Time website at https://time.com/6330652/biden-ai-order/.  Paul Kingsnorth's article "AI Demonic" appeared in the November/December 2023 issue of Touchstone, pp. 29-40, and was reprinted from Kingsnorth's substack "The Abbey of Misrule."

We Don't Chat — For Now

 

Today (Sunday, Sept. 20) the U. S. Department of Commerce implemented an unprecedented ban on a major Chinese social media company, WeChat.  Citing security concerns, President Trump issued an executive order on Aug. 6 to cripple WeChat and TikTok, but the TikTok order has been delayed until November.

 

Not so WeChat.  While it will not be illegal for individuals to continue using WeChat in the U. S., it may become difficult or impossible in the days to come. 

 

The Dept. of Commerce order bans the distribution of the WeChat app to new phones and prohibits the transfer of funds through the app.  It also prohibits internet service providers from servicing the app, and so unless your ISP is based outside the U. S., the app may disappear altogether.  Some of the terms of the ban are rather technical, but I think a word from the underworld covers the intent of the order:  they want to kneecap WeChat. 

 

Anyone who knows a person who speaks Chinese has probably heard them at least mention WeChat.  It's operated by the huge Chinese Google-like conglomerate Tencent, and is sort of like Facebook on steroids.  In addition to allowing Facebook-like interactions, it serves as a money transfer medium, a news app, messaging app, and of course, an advertising medium.  According to a report in the Washington Post, the Chinese government censors it heavily, and independent investigators who tested it with 26,000 test words on accounts registered in China, Canada, and the U. S. found nearly 200 words triggered censorship in accounts with Chinese phone numbers.  Over three million people use WeChat in the U. S., and the majority of them are going to have big problems trying to continue with the app after today.

 

Why is the U. S. government landing on WeChat like a piano from a third-floor window?  The official announcement is terse on this:  "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S. Today’s announced prohibitions, when combined, protect users in the U.S. by eliminating access to these applications and significantly reducing their functionality."  Personally, my impression of what WeChat does is to connect Chinese speakers in the U. S. with their friends, relatives, associates, and (possibly) fellow spies back in China.  But because the vast majority of what goes on through WeChat is probably in Chinese, it's hard to see how the rest of the U. S. is directly harmed by the existence of the app.

 

What this looks like to me is more along the lines of a diplomatic tit-for-tat on a large scale.  Every so often the U. S. will catch some spies from another country and expel them.  It's entirely expected that in the days to follow, the foreign country will go to the U. S. embassy there and tell an equal number of U. S. diplomats or diplomatic staff to pack their bags and head back to the U. S. 

 

Ever since Facebook, Twitter, and company gained prominence, these U. S.-based apps have been heavily censored or flat-out banned in China, which is one reason why there was such a big vacuum for WeChat to fill.  In going a long way toward banning WeChat here, the U. S. government is simply saying, "You want to ban our apps?  Okay, we'll ban yours and see how you like that." 

 

Such moves have their place in a carefully planned strategic pressure-building exercise that includes sanctions of other kinds.  But this administration's actions toward China do not exactly give the impression of careful deliberation.  Nevertheless, being startling and unpredictable can itself be an effective strategy, and it's possible that WeChat and even the Chinese Communist Party itself was caught off guard.

 

The broader picture of U. S.-China relations, while not explicitly a matter of engineering ethics, deserves mention at this point.  While allowing economic freedom to a great extent, the Chinese government continues to repress political freedom and systematically persecutes certain groups such as the Falun Gong religious organization and the ethnic group termed Uighurs.  These are deplorable actions that deserve censure, and if the WeChat ban is a sort of punishment for these things, it is well deserved. 

 

On the other hand, one has to ask how effective it will be.  Something else not called WeChat but doing everything WeChat does is probably in development at this instant, and the Department of Commerce order hinted that they might take care of that too, if WeChat shows up under another name.  What this action has started is a social-media-ban war that will be marked by a ban followed by an evasive move, then followed by another ban, and so on.  The WeChat users, most of whom probably do nothing more sinister than checking on Aunt Hong in Wuhan every now and then, are caught in the middle, and will have to struggle along as best they can with old-fashioned phone calls or whatever ingenious programmers and companies can come up with to evade the ban. 

 

And there is always the possibility that, as the clock runs down to Election Day, this anti-China move will turn out to be just a political plum offered to supporters of the President, rather than a calculated diplomatic move in a well-crafted chess game.  I don't know how many Chinese-American citizens voted for President Trump in 2016, but this action probably has not endeared him to them. 

 

Historically, one reason the WorldWideWeb has appealed philosophically to certain tendencies of mind is that it does not recognize borders.  For people whose ideal world would be a borderless global block party under a single benevolent government, that has been one of the strengths of the Internet-mediated thing that lets people chat with others halfway around the world as though they were in the same room.  But the Department of Commerce move is an attempt to impose borders on what began as a borderless cyberworld.  Whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply a political stunt that will soon be forgotten is something we can't tell yet.  All we can be sure of is that U. S. users of WeChat are going to have a hard time continuing to use it, and we'll just have to wait to see what the wider effects are, if any.

 

Sources:  The official U. S. Department of Commerce statement regarding its orders on WeChat and TikTok can be found at https://www.commerce.gov/news/press-releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions-protect.  I also referred to a Washington Post article at https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/18/wechat-ban-faq/.

Will 2015 Be The Year Commercial Drones Take Off?

If you had been in Boulder City, Nevada last December 19, you would have found Governor Brian Sandoval, a U. S. senator, U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials, and representatives of a company that manufactures the Magpie, an unmanned aircraft, all gathered to watch the first official test flight at one of six new test facilities the FAA has established to explore how "unmanned aircraft systems" (UASs for short) can safely use the same airspace that is now occupied by manned aircraft.  A video of the test flight shows a man holding what looks like a large model plane.  At a signal, he heaves it into the air.  It flies about twenty feet and nose-dives into the gravel, bending its nose propeller and eliciting a groan from the crowd.

It wasn't exactly an auspicious start to a program that the FAA has undertaken to fast-track new regulations that will accommodate the increasing pressure on the agency to allow legal commercial use of UASs, commonly called drones, far beyond what present regulations permit.  But at least nobody was hurt, except maybe in the pride department.  As I noted in this space over a year ago, experimental drones can be deadly—a large one went amok in South Korea in 2013 and killed an engineer. 

What we are seeing in commercial drone development is a pattern that has played out repeatedly in one form or another whenever a potentially profitable technology outpaces the ability of a regulatory agency to adapt to it.  True to its generally good reputation among government agencies, the FAA is trying to catch up to the rapid advances in commercial drone technology.  But if history is any guide, we are in for some stirring times first.

Something similar happened when advances in radio technology during World War I led to the explosion of radio broadcasting stations in the early 1920s.  The creaky regulatory mechanism of the time stated that the Department of Commerce, which was charged with the task of regulating the new medium, could not deny licenses to any qualified applicant.  As a result, the airwaves got so crowded that in some locations radios were practically unusable.  Congress eventually acted, first by establishing the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, and then following it with the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, under whose ministrations we still operate today. 

Fortunately, the FAA is already up and running, so the situation is not as wild-westish as it could be.  The main issue facing the agency is not lack of regulatory authority—it has plenty of that—but the question of how to allow drones into the air in a way that both allows innovative commercial uses and preserves the exemplary safety record of U. S. air flights that has been achieved in recent years.  The experimental test sites the FAA has set up (besides Nevada, there are locations in Alaska, New York, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia) can play a critical role in both uncovering unknown potential problems and in finding practical solutions to them.

Just as radio benefited from wartime technology advances, commercial drones benefit from the longer history and huge development effort that has gone into military drones.  In addition, advances in high-density batteries, software, and navigational aids such as GPS systems make it technically possible for drones to travel long distances autonomously.  However, the FAA is still uncomfortable with that.

The way things stand now, there are three classifications of drone regulations.  The only one that doesn't require the operator to obtain special permission is the hobby and recreational class, which has applied to operators of model aircraft for decades.  If you are a researcher, drone developer, or someone who has other good reasons to do not-for-pay work with drones, you can apply for a "civil UAS" permit.  Law enforcement agencies and other public organizations can obtain Certificates of Waiver or Authorization to conduct operations relating to their work.  But before the likes of Jeff Bezos can start delivering Amazon orders via drone, the rules—and maybe the technology too—will have to change. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but the start of a new year is a good time for making predictions, and if the following pans out, you heard it here first.  Let it be understood at the outset that I think the following would be a bad idea.  But that doesn't mean that somebody won't try it.  In 1982, a guy with more bravado than sense named Larry Walters tied a few dozen helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated over Long Beach until his balloons got tangled in a power line and he made it safely back to the ground.  I don't know what the payload capability of current small quadcopter-like drones is, but at some point, somebody will have the idea of ganging a bunch of them together to lift the weight of a small person.  This would be more of a stunt than a practical way of transporting people, but if the machines get cheap and powerful enough, it will happen. 

Of course, the FAA would disapprove of such a thing, and rightly so.  But if we do start seeing small packages being delivered by drones, it will happen only if the FAA and industrial interests figure out how to have all that air traffic moving safely and keeping out of the way of buildings, power lines, and giraffes, for that matter.  And if that infrastructure problem is solved, and battery technology advances to the point that you could safely build a helicopter-like backpack that was totally under software control, maybe we could see the day when people could literally fly to work.  Unless it rains, of course.

Sources:  The FAA's overall UAS website is https://www.faa.gov/uas/, and their site stating the rules for hobby and recreational model-airplane flying is http://www.faa.gov/uas/publications/model_aircraft_operators/.  I referred to a report on the Nevada test flight of Magpie carried by Gizmodo at http://gizmodo.com/first-drone-launches-at-faa-test-site-in-nevada-crashe-1673586255.  The six FAA UAS test locations are given at http://gizmodo.com/federal-drone-testing-is-coming-to-these-6-scenic-locat-1491708151.  Business Insider was the source of the commercial drone market estimate at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-market-for-commercial-drones-2014-2.  My blog "Drones, Air Safety, and the FAA" appeared on Nov. 4, 2013.

Democracy By Sampling

If you had stopped by my house last Saturday, you would have seen me seated on the front porch in a folding chair, watching a presentation on a laptop connected to a notebook computer, which was in turn operated by a woman seated in another folding chair.  The woman works for a contractor to the U. S. Department of Commerce.  The contractor, Abt SRBI, performs high-tech surveys for government agencies.  Instead of pencils and clipboards, the woman brought along the aforementioned technology that she used to show me the options I had for each answer, as well as photographs and other information related to the survey questions.  My subject today is not so much the actual content of the survey (which she requested I keep confidential so as not to bias other potential participants), but the entire process of which the survey was a part, which I'm calling "democracy by sampling."

One vital aspect of engineering ethics is to consider all the stakeholders in a given case, including members of the public liable to be affected by a proposed course of action.  I think it's okay for me to say this much about the survey:  it dealt with a proposed program that the Department of Commerce may implement, and would entail substantial costs to be borne by the U. S. taxpayer.  The program would address an environmental issue which it turns out I have discussed in this space in the past, and it would deal with it in a way that struck me as egregiously boneheaded.  And I told them so.

But unless you, gentle reader, are one of the 1500 or so people nationwide selected to participate in this survey, if you wish to register your opinion on this subject with the government, you are out of luck.  This is unfair, but all too symptomatic of a disheartening trend that has picked up the momentum of an avalanche in recent years.

The ideal of democratic government is that it is, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "of the people, by the people, for the people."  The preposition in question here is "by."  Ultimately, the authority of government is to vest in the people governed.  The means by which this power is exercised in our type of government is through the legislative branch, meaning Congress.  Originally, the only role of the executive branch was to see that the laws were "faithfully executed." 

But beginning in the Progressive era of the early 1900s, a different view of government arose, which can be summarized as government by experts.  The basic idea is that modern life is too complex to leave governance solely to the slow, messy process of legislating laws.  Instead, new powers should devolve upon educated specialists in such fields as finance, technology and its regulation, commerce, and human relations, and we should allow these experts to make such rules as they think best—rules that have the full force of law.  So far, any agency of this type still holds before its face a mask of democracy, in that the agencies exercising such power have to be established by Congress.  But there are so many of them now that Congress can no longer exercise anything like proper oversight anymore.  The result is that executive agencies like the Department of Commerce and its divisions are left to their own devices and desires.

I will grant this to the Department:  in commissioning the survey I participated in, they are genuinely seeking the input of the public, or at least a sample thereof.  They didn't have to do that—as far as I know, they could just haul off and implement the new program they're considering without asking anybody, and we would all just have to live with it.  So they are at least making a gesture toward the idea of democracy.  But it is an ineffectual gesture, in my opinion.

As a part of the survey, I had an opportunity to "vote" for or against the program, and to give reasons for doing so.  But this "vote" is to real voting as hypocrisy is to holiness.  What if we "voted" to elect the President this way?  It would save tons of money and trouble.  Instead of the Electoral College and all that campaign fundraising and advertising and so on, we'd just hand the whole thing over to Abt SRBI, whose experts would come up with a carefully selected sample of 1500 or so voters, and the rest of us would just wait to find out the results, as determined by the experts.  So much more efficient—so much more scientific.

And so much more opposed to the basic notion of rule by law, and not by men.  One of the big reasons that the thirteen British colonies broke away from England was that they were being taxed by those whom they did not elect.  Based on the information I received during the survey, the proposed program would have done exactly that—nothing was mentioned about any enabling legislation.  This sort of thing happens all the time.  The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to categorize carbon dioxide as a pollutant is a shining example of how unelected bureaucrats can unilaterally proclaim costly regulations, and those injured are forced to undertake expensive legal battles as their only recourse. 

The Department of Commerce deserves one small cheer for consulting me about their idea.  But the whole executive branch gets a loud razz for continuing its drive toward government by bureaucracy that has compromised freedom and due process in this country so severely, that some days I wonder if we can ever get them back again.