Artificial intelligence was the subject of a Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources hearing held Thursday addressing Department of Energy research.
At the hearing, committee members discussed the DOE’s role in regulating AI technology and the risks associated with AI’s influence in the workplace.
“AI is already changing the world at a remarkable pace. We’re seeing it deployed in battlefields across the world. Ukraine has successfully used AI-enabled drone swarms against the Russian forces,” Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, said in his opening remarks. “But make no mistake: artificial intelligence also presents many risks.”
Lawmakers brought up US competitiveness with China, the danger of misinformation and the risks of creating a domestic AI workforce, among other concerns.
They also highlighted AI’s many potential applications, such as combating natural disasters.
Not every senator perfectly captured the urgency and capability of artificial intelligence, however. At one point, Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, used Chat GPT to write a poem about Manchin and Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming.
Speakers at the hearing included Energy Deputy Secretary David Turk, Hewlett Packard Labs VP Andrew Wheeler, Argonne National Laboratory Associate Director Rick Stevens and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology senior fellow Anna Puglisi.
Notably, the Department of Energy has taken up the mantle of researching artificial intelligence. Last month, the department released an updated AI inventory, essentially a list of AI use cases that it is currently using or planning to deploy.
Many such applications involve research being done at national laboratories, such as groundwater modeling or simulation-based inference in cosmology.
Contact Andrew Kessel at andrew.kessel@proactiveinvestors.com
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