AIU.S. Should Build Capacity to Rapidly Detect and Respond to AI Developments

It is imperative to improve near real-time observation and tracking of progress in artificial intelligence (AI), its adoption, and its impacts on the workforce, and to widely share this information to better inform and equip workers, policymakers, and others who will have to flexibly respond to AI developments, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

With rapid technical progress in AI likely to continue, the precise trajectories of AI-enabled futures are uncertain, underscoring the need for society to be able to understand and respond nimbly to new developments, the report says. AI’s progression, its labor market consequences, and its effects on society will depend on both the rate and direction of AI’s capabilities and on demographic, social, institutional, and political forces.  

AI has emerged as a general-purpose technology with sweeping implications, the report says. Innovations in neural networks and a shift to larger, unannotated datasets — often aggregated from the internet — have largely driven the recent surge of technical progress in AI. Adoption has been facilitated by the availability of cloud services and ease of integration into computing platforms. Dramatic advances with generative AI systems have been accompanied by steady progress in other areas of AI such as robotics, with self-driving vehicles being tested in multiple cities, for example, and in other forms of machine learning.

The report, requested by Congress as part of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, examines how AI is likely to complement or replace human labor, reshape job markets, and influence workforce dynamics. It emphasizes that AI should be developed in accordance with society’s shared values and goals, and it should be used to enhance human well-being, augment collective capabilities, and support a well-equipped future workforce. It also lays out scenarios to help guide research and policymaking toward beneficial deployment of AI, as it will require intentional design to deploy AI to enhance human labor, complement expertise, and create new forms of valuable work.