Lynne Parker, who until August served as founding director of the White House’s National Artificial Intelligence Office (NAIIO), said this week that she’d like to see individual Federal agencies get more involved with regulation of AI technologies in the sectors that they oversee.
“I would like to see the agencies that have regulatory authorities over particular use cases of AI to consider within their domain and within those use cases, what kind of regulation is needed,” Parker said an October 6 event organized by NextGov.
‘Because at the end of the day, our regulatory enterprise in the United States revolves around the agencies that have a variety of different regulatory authorities for certain areas,” she said.
Parker explained that the challenge of trying to better understand AI and creating the necessary guardrails for its use turns on the wide variety of use cases for the technology.
“The challenge is that AI is not all the same, and every use case is not the same. And so you can’t easily have an overarching approach that tries to treat all AI the same because it won’t work,” she said.
“That’s why I think we need to consider this on a sector-specific basis. And the easiest way to do that and the most appropriate way in my opinion is for the regulatory agencies to get more involved,” stated Parker
The question of regulation of AI comes on the heels of a recently released White House document – the ‘Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights – which the administration hopes will form part of the bedrock for shaping AI use both in the public and private sectors.
While the document is not backed up by the force of law, Parker said she sees it having sufficient weight to create a ripple effect in the AI world.
“I think with this latest AI Bill of Rights – you have a ripple effect, where even though it doesn’t have any teeth – it still suggests approaches that industry or federal government should pursue, and I think it’s that bully pulpit that has the ability to influence others, even though there’s not legal teeth to it,” she said.
