The presidential elections in the United States are in their final stages. Ahead of Election Day on November 5, Engadget looks at where candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump stand on today’s most important tech issues.
While it may not garner the headlines that immigration, abortion, or inflation do, artificial intelligence is quietly one of the most important issues this election season. Which rules are enforced, and how strongly they are enforced, will have far-reaching implications for consumer privacy, intellectual property, the media industry, and national security.
Policymakers generally lack clear or coherent policies on emerging technologies. But somewhat surprisingly, both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have at least some experience working with artificial intelligence. VP Harris in particular has been very hands-on in shaping the current administration’s approach. Donald Trump was the first president to sign an executive order on artificial intelligence.
However, neither has made AI a central component of their campaigns, and here we make some educated guesses as to how both will approach it in the White House.
Kamala Harris
With Harris’ significant involvement in the Biden administration’s AI efforts, it’s safe to assume he’ll move forward with many of these policies. While the White House began laying the groundwork for AI initiatives in early 2021, they won’t ramp up until late 2023, and Harris has often been the public face of those efforts, including holding numerous press calls on the issue. and it appears Global Summit on AI Security in London. He used these spaces to draw attention to AI’s potential pitfalls, big and small, from “cyberattacks on the scale we’ve seen before” to the “kicking out” of the elderly. [their] healthcare plan due to faulty AI algorithm.
An executive order was issued on this in October 2023 Safe, Secure and Reliable Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. The order seeks to strengthen AI’s potential to solve a wide range of societal problems, as well as its potential to “reduce societal harms such as fraud, discrimination, bias, and misinformation; transfer and dismiss employees; stifles competition and creates risks for national security.” It laid out eight guiding principles aimed at creating standardized assessments for AI systems, protecting workers, protecting consumer privacy and combating inherent bias.
It also called for agencies to name a chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) and tasked the federal government with developing policies and strategies that use and regulate artificial intelligence. This includes developing technologies to identify and tag AI-generated content, and building safeguards to prevent the creation of images depicting sexual exploitation and deep-fake pornography.
Harris helped secured obligations Apple, Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, Adobe, Cohere, IBM, NVIDIA, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, Stability and OpenAI to work towards the administration’s goals. He also sought approval from 31 countries for a declaration on the responsible creation and use of military artificial intelligence. At this stage, the latter is simply a commitment to work together to create rules and guidelines. But there are many absences from this list, especially Russia, China and Israel.
Because the technology is so new, there are still many questions about how the Harris administration will handle AI. In addition, without an act of Congress, the White House cannot regulate the industry or punish those who violate its policies.
On the campaign trail, Harris didn’t say much new on the issue, outside of a brief note on Wall Street. fundraising“We will promote innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence and digital assets while protecting our consumers and investors,” he said. There is Harris It has strong ties to Silicon Valleyso it remains to be seen how much it will try to rein in the industry. But so far, most of his statements have focused on protecting consumers and workers.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump has the distinction of being the first president to sign AI related executive orderhowever, his actual public statements on the matter are limited. In February 2019, he founded American AI The initiative, which created the first national artificial intelligence research institutes, called for doubling funding for artificial intelligence research and introduced broad regulatory guidelines. He also called for the creation of a National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office, which would act as a central hub for coordinating research and policy within the government.
Not surprisingly, the executive order signed by former President Trump and the policies pushed by his allies are more focused on encouraging private sector growth and limiting government oversight. Officer The platform of the Republican Party He called for the repeal of the executive order, which passed the RNC in July and was signed by Biden in October 2023, arguing that it “impedes AI Innovation and imposes radical left-wing views on the development of this technology.” He calls for the development of artificial intelligence “based on Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Unfortunately, the RNC platform and Trump aren’t much more specific than that. So let’s take a look at what the former president’s allies at the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation have to offer to get a better idea of how a second Trump presidency might handle AI.
America First began drafting a document calling for the launch earlier this year The Manhattan Projects for military AI and regulatory reduction. (There are currently limited regulations on AI, as the government is mostly in the data-gathering phase of policy development. Congress has yet to pass any meaningful AI legislation.)
He also called for the creation of industry-led agencies tasked with evaluating and securing American AI technologies. That contrasts with an executive order from the Biden administration that placed responsibility for the effort in the hands of the federal government.
of the Heritage Foundation Project 2025 (PDF) goes into more detail, though it’s worth noting that Trump has tried to distance himself from that document quite a bit. Much of the AI debate in the 922-page book focuses on China: opposing its technological progress, limiting its access to American technology, and preventing it from supporting joint research projects with American interests, particularly on college campuses. It calls for increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in intelligence gathering and analysis, while also calling for greater reliance on the private sector to develop and manage the technology.
The document also spends considerable time discussing AI’s potential to “reduce waste, fraud and abuse,” particularly with regard to Medicare and Medicaid. However, it makes almost no mention of protecting consumer privacy, ensuring the accuracy and fairness of algorithms, or identifying abusive or deceptive uses of AI, beyond combating Chinese propaganda.
Predictable wide strokes
While neither candidate’s platform has specifics on how to regulate artificial intelligence, they lay out two distinctly different approaches. Kamala Harris has made consumer protections and building guardrails against abuse a cornerstone of her AI policy proposals; Donald Trump has predictably focused on deregulation. None of them suggested that they would try to put the AI genie back in the bottle, let alone that such a thing would be possible.
The big question marks are how much of the Trump administration’s proposals from the America First Policy Institute, or the 2025 Project, will be accepted. Its own official platform reflects many of the policy positions of Project 2025. While it doesn’t specifically reflect any of his AI proposals, there’s little reason to believe that his approach would be dramatically different on this particular issue.
