The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Vice-Chair Liz Bradley from University of Colorado Boulder and CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Times in Artificial Intelligence are or should be changing. See Bob Dylan’s 1964 lyrics below.
Last week the New York Times published an article titled “A.I. Researchers See Danger of Haves and Have-Nots.” Modern AI research, which demands enormous computational resources, large data sets, and significant human expertise, is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone outside the large tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
This includes university labs—which, as the article points out, have traditionally been a wellspring of innovations that eventually power new products and services.
This issue, which echoes challenges raised by Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) recent A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research report, is a major barrier in the path to the technological future. Breaking down that barrier will require new models for resources, collaboration, and funding, including the kinds of significant US investments that have produced phenomenal outcomes, like the Apollo program, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Human Genome Project. Tech companies have an important role to play here, as the article points out, in the form of support for academic research, including access to data and computing. This would not only align with corporate self interest, but also be in the best interests of the field of AI and its many powerful applications, which are increasingly threaded through every part of society and the economy.
The article raises other important concerns as well, including the relationship between academia and the tech giants regarding human resources. Companies hire away professors, graduate students and even undergraduates. Ironically, most of the AI leaders quoted in the article moved from academia to industry in the past few years. This trend, which is cutting deeply into universities’ AI programs, is likely to have major impacts on the future of the AI workforce, as discussed in CCC’s recent industry white paper. The differences in constraints, incentives, and timelines of corporate and academic AI research are another issue. The field’s single-minded focus on accuracy, as Lohr points out, skews research along too narrow a path that neglects ethical concerns, workforce requirements, data needs, and the carbon footprint of the farms that run these computations. Leveling the playing field—democratizing the use of AI—and bringing in a multidimensional view that includes all areas of computer science and computer engineering, as well as cognitive science, psychology, biology, mathematics, public policy, ethics,education, and communication, to name just a few, will be necessary to the health of the field, going forward.
…
Come, writers and critics,
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Come, senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’
—Bob Dylan, 1964, emphasis added
