Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies advanced rapidly over the past several years. Governments around the world responded by developing AI strategies. France released its national AI strategy in March 2018, emphasising research funds, ethical issues, and inequality. China stated a goal of being the top AI country by 2030. The EU, Canada, Japan, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and many others have put forth their own plans (Sutton 2018).
Pessimistic views of the impact of AI on society are widespread. Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and others warn that rapid advances in AI could transform society for the worse. More optimistically, AI could enhance productivity so dramatically that people have plenty of income and little unpleasant work to do (Stevenson 2018). Regardless of whether one adopts a pessimistic or optimistic view, policy will shape how AI affects society.
What is AI?
While the Oxford English Dictionary defines artificial intelligence as "the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence”, the recent excitement is driven by advances in machine learning, a field of computer science focused on prediction. As machine learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton put it: "Take any old problem where you have to predict something and you have a lot of data, and deep learning is probably going to make it work better than existing techniques”.1 Recent advances in AI can therefore be seen as a drop in the cost of prediction. Because prediction is an important input into decision-making, in recent work we discuss how AI is likely to have widespread consequences as a general purpose technology (Agrawal et al. 2018a, 2018b).
There are two aspects of AI policy.
