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Safer roadways, accelerated drug development and greener power – just some of the ways AI could change the way we live and work.
These were among the topics on the agenda when at an invitation-only conference titled “AI Aspirations: R&D for Public Missions,” I recently had the privilege of attending, at the new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Center in the heart of Washington, DC. Steps from the Capitol building. Across the street from a personal favorite, The National Gallery, this summit was coordinated by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The event brought together a diverse group of leaders from various agencies, including Commerce, Education and Transportation, a state senator or two (thanks for being there, Amy Klobuchar and Mark Warner) and leadership from the FDA, Office of Management and Budget, and National Science Foundation. The conversation focused on each speakers’ group’s aspirations for AI, taking an “imagine if” approach to highlight what the future could look like.
Following President Biden’s Executive Order setting the standard for “safe, secure and trustworthy” AI, teams across the federal government have been activated to embrace the transformational power of AI along with its risks, and the conference’s key focus was to provide each speaker with an opportunity to share their vision for harnessing AI to achieve America’s great ambitions.
The theme of possibilities was consistent across the day’s presentations and dialogues. This is a sentiment that translates to the work we do every day in comms, particularly in the tech sector, as companies seek to balance between the promise and the risks that AI adoption brings with it.
Each speaker interpreted possibilities differently today as they relate to AI and the potential it has to transform all aspects of American life and work.
Some of the most interesting highlights I captured from the discussion were:
Evelyn Wang, Director, ARPA-E: She spoke to the power of AI to de-carbonize the electrical grid, saying “what we care about is not the grid but about the lives it lets us live” and that they don’t want people to “worry about where their electricity comes from, but what we do with it.”
Robert Califf, FDA Commissioner and Wade Shen, Director, Proactive Health at ARPA-H: They discussed AI’s burgeoning potential to transform the face of modern healthcare, particularly in the form of leveraging LLMs to predict chemical and biological properties and significant speed up as well as expand the scope of drug development to address the large amounts of conditions that still lack effective therapies.
Both stressed the challenges facing the data case in healthcare, particularly the difficulty in aggregating healthcare data for maximum usability. An additional challenge comes in navigating IP and PII concerns and synthetic data is being brought in to address this through augmenting the anonymized insights being gathered in automated experiment data to fill current gaps in availability of usable inputs.
Other key concerns facing AI and healthcare continue to revolve around the financial constraints that keep many institutions from implementing traditional or generative AI.
Robert Hampshire, Chief Science Officer and Ben Levine, Director of Strategic Initiatives, US Department of Transportation: With an eye to keeping “feet on the ground, but head in the stars,” they explained that he DOT is in the midst of executing several exciting modernization projects that will enable and benefit from expanded use of AI in the future. Chief among these are the Intersection Safety Challenge and the Complete Streets AI Initiative, which seek to improve overall design and activity on US roadways.
Quoting a sobering stat sourced from Agency data, there is one fatality every 13 minutes on US roadways, amounting to enough deaths in one day to fill a 737 airplane. The current digital footprint suffers from gaps due to fragmented data, and the department proposes a naturally-available database ecosystem to speed the currently sluggish process of gathering and cleaning data to enable scalable applications and analysis for future improvements and to realize their vision for a national transportation infrastructure observatory.
As we’re continuing to see in our work every day with technology companies across industries, a solid data foundation is essential to execute the promise and possibilities of AI and turning the “what ifs” into realities. It continues to be invigorating to hear about the possibilities AI brings directly from the experts, practitioners, and leaders and to leverage the power of these experiences to enhance and improve our work as comms professionals as the innovations and dialogues continue.
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