I suspect we will see OSTP emphasize tech accountability under her leadership, which will be especially pertinent to hot button AI issues like facial recognition, algorithmic bias, data privacy, corporate influence on research, and the myriad of other issues that I write about in The Algorithm.
Finally, Biden’s new secretary of state made clear that technology will still be an important geopolitical force. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Antony Blinken remarked that there is “an increasing divide between techno democracies and techno autocracies. Whether techno democracies or techno autocracies are the ones who get to define how tech is used…will go a long way toward shaping the next decades.” As pointed out by Politico, this most clearly is an allusion to China, and the idea that the US is in a race with the country to develop emerging technologies like AI and 5G. OneZero’s Dave Gershgorn reported in 2019 that this had become a rallying cry at the Pentagon. Speaking at an AI conference in Washington, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, framed the technological race “in dramatic terms,” wrote Gershgorn: “A future of global authoritarianism or global democracy.”
Blinken’s comments suggest to me that the Biden administration will likely continue this thread from the Trump administration. That means it may continue putting export controls on sensitive AI technologies and placing bans on Chinese tech giants to do business with American entities. It’s possible the administration may also invest more in building up the US’s high-tech manufacturing capabilities in an attempt to disentangle its AI chip supply chain from China.
Correction: Jack Clark is the former, not current, policy director at OpenAI.
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