Georges Clemenceau (provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive as part of a cooperation project, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license)
My guess is that just about everyone has encountered the aphorism “War is too important to be left to the generals,” which is usually attributed to Georges Clemenceau, who was prime minister of France during the first quarter of the last century. This morning I was reminded that digital technology is just as important. As might be guessed, the trigger for that association can be traced back our president, Donald Trump.
The source of that trigger was the following New York Times headline: “Trump Plans to Sign Executive Order Granting Oversight of A.I. Models.” The subtitle of the headline is just as chilling: “The executive order, which would signal a shift from the hands-off approach the White House previously took, follows debates over how to gain control over A.I. models without disrupting innovation.” To be fair, a considerable amount of my time went into the theory and practice of artificial intelligence (A.I.) during about half of my undergraduate years and all my research efforts as a graduate student. I suspect that neither of the authors of the Times article, Tripp Mickle and Sheera Frenkel, are as informed about A.I. as well as any students (undergraduate and graduate) and professionals.
To be fair, on the other hand, I suspect that both of those authors are better equipped to make decisions about A.I. than anyone working in the White House (at any level), not to mention those working in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. One way of putting this is that there is a very wide gap between expertise in the digital world and decision-making at just about any level of the structure of our government. Sadly, I doubt that such a gap can be closed, simply because it takes too much time; and those working for the government have their hands fuller than ever.
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