Artificial Intelligence is here faster than you thought or as Baseball Pitcher Satchel Page noted, "Don't look back --- somebody may be gaining on you."

Jack Belcher, Phd. FRM Chief Technology Innovation Officer / Chief Information Officer, Arlington County, Virginia

Jack Belcher, Phd. FRM Chief Technology Innovation Officer / Chief Information Officer, Arlington County, Virginia

Well into my second week of retirement and I was wondering what to do next. I had been reading Chip Conley’s discussion about age and how we are living much longer than expected. It used to be that my father’s generation hoped that they could reach the age of 65 and retire. Now as Conley in his Elder Academy notes that 65 is merely the beginning of your next stage of career.By his estimation, if in good health, 90 is the new 65.

Saying that I still have the passion to contribute and hopefully right the course of public service IT. I had just published an OPED on the crisis of technology in the public sector. For years I have advised and argued with little success that IT must be at the table when policy decisions were being considered. I cited in the article the great inhibitors to that happening. Simply leadership, outdated budget processes and the emerging talent gap.

Looking at what was next, I felt a discussion of the ChatGPT. A godsend topic that just fell into my lap. We all know ChatGPT( Generative Pre-Trained Transformer). Announced by OpenAI in November30 of 2022, built upon the OpenAI’s GPT family of large language models that is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforced learning techniques. In one month, the CEO tweeted they would have one billion users by end of 2023. In one week they had over one million users. It already portends to create a processing bottleneck exhausting existing computing power available.The key descriptive adjective is the word ‘Generative’. Simply, proscribed algorithms that can be used to create new content. Meaning the technology is creating the truth as it sees it.

All whom I discuss this phenomena with, say ‘This is a Game Changer’If you read the Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher, Henry Kissinger treatise ‘The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future’ They suggest this will happen, but not as soon as it did.

“School administrators across the nation are scrambling to find ways to thwart this devilish technology advancement.”

The good news if you are a struggling high school student charged with writing an essay on Thomas Jefferson and his views on slavery, you merely put in the criteria and this automated artificial intelligence engine scours the Internet for relative material and presents an artificially constructed paper and you are now back to your video games.

So fast has its adoption been, that just about every student worth their salt is mining this trove of research to outfox their high school education system. School administrators across the nation are scrambling to find ways to thwart this devilish technology advancement.

Seemingly, harmless? Not so fast. What is the impact of this? The exponential growth of GPT3 since November 30, 2022 is expected to be surpassed by a new version in the next month or so, GPT4 by a significant order of magnitude.

The impacts of all phases of our lives has yet to be even minimally assessed. Cybersecurity itself is at risk, as intelligent agents like this can understand any task, copy it and use it for another unintended purpose.

More broadly speaking, it is the general understanding that there is no framework to assure that the algorithms supporting AI are not biased, unfair or discriminatory. The feeling as always been, ‘well we have time to adjust in good time to such technological developments!’ I am not sure that is the case with such exponential growth as we have seen from ChatGPT. The Constitution is silent on areas where a system has negative impacts on a specific group, but is not explicitly biased against them.’

There is a lack of any cohesive federal policy to regulate the development, implementation and regulation of such technologies.

Imagine the future where AI supported technologies are offered to local governments without any review of the methodology employed to manage the system. How would you know what biases are inherent in the operation of that system?

Late in the Obama Administration there was a recognition that such regulatory frameworks were necessary to be considered. Little was done. The Trump Administration took a ‘hands-off’ approach. Today, there is a movement underway to create a bi-partisan committee in the United States House of Representatives to consider such a framework.An interesting fact is that the Minority Chair for such a Congressional Committee if authorized is Don Beyer (D.VA) who is enrolled in a graduate course at George Mason University in AI and Machine Learning, at age 72.

In the meantime, the creation of these AI engines is the sole proprietorship of Big Tech. Thankfully, in the case of ChatGPT, Microsoft through its leadership place ethical implementation at that the center of consideration. Imagine if Elon Musk was in charge?

Why this is so important an issue for the citizen is that it is at the heart of the other emerging technology developments. If biased, unfair or discriminatory practices can be ‘baked’ into new technology introductions. What negative consequences could there be wrought?

Imagine some possible consequences

Traffic Management that recognizes where vehicular traffic is coming from and prioritizes signaling to accommodate the traffic from more affluent neighborhoods.

Parking Management that reserves choice on street parking

Community Event Management that imposes limits on the attendees based on unknown criteria adopted by the AI algorithms.

Social Media, where news unvalidated by the jurisdiction appears on Government letterhead with Leadership signatures.Fake News taken to awhole other level.

The good news that many governments have already realized the problems associated with data collection and privacy. How to achieve a fair balance to collect only what is necessary and to sure that the privacy of the individual is assured. Yet these efforts are distributed and discussed by not all local governments.

What the accelerated growth and expansion of ChatGBT has made us aware is that more needs to be done. There needs to be awareness by local leadership that this is happening and faster than anyone ever assumed it would.

Another reason why IT needs to be at the table when discussions of such possible impact to the community are being had. But will they?

Too often these discussions are being held in the back room, in closed session discussion. How inconsiderate would be to have such public discussion? Not, and they should be. Do we delegate such policy discussion to non-elected officials who live in anonymit?