During a House Oversight Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) questioned Neil Chilson, Head of AI Policy at the Abundance Institute, about challenges in artificial intelligence development.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you, Mr. Slocum. I now recognize myself for five minutes.
00:04Mr. Chilson, America has what some have described as a golden opportunity to lead in the next generation of AI,
00:11but many barriers still exist, as has been mentioned.
00:17What is really holding us back from reaching our full potential, such as securing investment and private capital?
00:27So there are many challenges for this moonshot, and I want to endorse Mr. Mill's idea that it's private industry that's going to drive this ahead,
00:43and it's Congress's job to build the right launch pad for this moonshot.
00:47And so clearing the launch pad is the first thing.
00:50And I think especially in the energy space, permitting processes that slow down the ability to deploy and build new energy,
00:59not in a way that actually achieves, in many cases, the economic or the environmental benefits that we're seeking,
01:07but in a way that just drags things out unnecessarily slow and gives veto points to people who don't necessarily have environmental concerns in hand.
01:15But the other big challenge, I think, in this space is a transformation that we're seeing largely at the state level
01:23about how we consider software and how we regulate software.
01:27And so software traditionally has been regulated not directly but indirectly in the uses in which it's put.
01:35So, for example, we have regulation on medical devices, which often incorporate software.
01:41We have regulation on transportation. Cars are rolling computers at this point.
01:47And so when we regulate at the use rather than at the general computation level or the general software development level,
01:56we get closer to the harm, we get closer to the goals of regulation, and we avoid really unintended consequences.
02:03And so states are rolling out these big-picture regulatory schemes for software.
02:08I think that's a real challenge, and I think it's something that Congress needs to step in on.
02:13Thank you. My other question has to do with the fact that there's been a lot of fear, a lot of concern or worry about what the potential outcomes might be.
02:22But to me, I see the potential for how our economy is going to pivot and grow and the tremendous opportunities that we will receive.
02:35Why do you think Americans should be more excited about the prospects and the job opportunities that AI might bring than be fearful?
02:46Well, I think the, you know, why is artificial intelligence important?
02:51It's because intelligence is important.
02:52And the ability to deploy new, powerful computation to some of the most challenging problems that we have as humans.
03:01The health care space is an amazing example of this.
03:04I just saw this morning there is a new paper in Nature that is giving a woman who has not been able to speak for years, she's fully paralyzed,
03:14it can scan her brain and she can speak by thinking the words in her head.
03:20And she can speak at 90 words per minute, which is, you know, slightly slower than I'm speaking, but not that much, right?
03:25And that's really impressive.
03:26That is the type of medical benefit that's direct.
03:29Outside of that, the economic benefits from efficiency, my written testimony goes into them much more.
03:36Trillions of dollars of potential benefit in this space.
03:39Mr. Levy, what are, how do we begin to implement, actually, let me ask this question.
03:46You described that we have different, that once we unlock this technology, that we have some real-life examples of services that are stopping us from doing so.
04:04How do data centers support, or what kind of real-world examples of regulations and things that are hindering you from, your data centers from moving forward?
04:16Thank you, Mr. Chair, I appreciate the question.
04:21And I would tell you that we are seeing a lot of barriers that are holding us back from moving forward as quickly as we can to meet these demand signals.
04:31Clearly, energy permitting is one, and the asynchronous timelines around which data centers can be constructed and potentially operated,
04:39but then be energized is very much a challenge.
04:43We could put a data center facility from, you know, groundbreaking to commissioning, 18 months to two years.
04:49In order to get energy projects online, we're looking at five years of permitting on average,
04:54up to seven years for permitting alone for transmission infrastructure.
04:57We're also seeing some challenges, regulatory barriers, when it comes to equipment, particularly electrical equipment.
05:06My time has expired.