PEJOURNAL – Major issues on the Biden table include fighting the coronavirus epidemic, providing financial support to Americans, and reversing Trump’s policies on climate change, international relations, and immigration, and as expected, cybersecurity still tops the Biden administration’s list of priorities and the new US president has shown signs of his government’s approach to the technology.
First of all, Biden elevated the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to a cabinet-level position and appointed top geneticist Eric Lander, the founding director of the MIT-Harvard Broad Institute, to the role. The OSTP advises the president on science and technology issues and guides science and technology policy and budget making across the government.
This suggests that while Trump mainly viewed AI as an important geopolitical tool—investing in its development for military purposes and to compete against China—Biden will also view it as one for scientific progress.
It is also expected to see more money funneled into conducting non-defense-related AI research, as well as more coordination among government agencies to measure and set technical standards for AI progress.
Jack Clark, the former policy director at Open AI, has been a major proponent of the latter. He has recommended that government agencies like NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) should develop capabilities to benchmark the performance of AI systems and test them for bias as a way for the government to not only better understand the technology as they make policies but also set goal posts for the AI research community.
Second, Biden named a prominent sociologist to serve as the OSTP deputy director.
Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, studies the societal impacts of emerging technologies like gene editing and artificial intelligence. Her appointment suggests to me that the Biden administration understands that effective science and technology policy must also consider the social influences on and implications of scientific advancement.
As Nelson said in her remarks upon receiving the position, “When we provide inputs to the algorithm; when we program the device; when we design, test, and research; we are making human choices—choices that bring our social world to bear in a new and powerful way.”
It should be suspected to see OSTP emphasize tech accountability under her leadership, which will be especially pertinent to hot button AI issues like facial recognition, algorithmic bias, data privacy, corporate influence on research, and the myriad of other issues that I write about in The Algorithm.
Finally, Biden’s new secretary of state made clear that technology will still be an important geopolitical force.
During his Senate confirmation hearing, Antony Blinken remarked that there is “an increasing divide between techno democracies and techno autocracies. Whether techno democracies or techno autocracies are the ones who get to define how tech is used, it will go a long way toward shaping the next decades.” As pointed out by Politico, this most clearly is an allusion to China, and the idea that the US is in a race with the country to develop emerging technologies like AI and 5G.
One Zero’s Dave Gershon reported in 2019 that this had become a rallying cry at the Pentagon. Speaking at an AI conference in Washington, Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, framed the technological race “in dramatic terms,” wrote Gershon: “A future of global authoritarianism or global democracy.”
Antony Blinken’s remarks suggest that the Biden administration is likely to follow in the footsteps of the Trump administration. This means that we will continue to control the export of sensitive AI technologies and ban Chinese technology giants from doing business with the Americans. The government is also likely to invest more in building high-tech manufacturing capabilities in an effort to cut the supply chain of artificial intelligence chips to China.
Another major program of the Biden government is cybersecurity
US President-elect Joe Biden has expressed grave concern over the ongoing hacking of key US government facilities following the publication of Politico, citing cybersecurity as one of his government’s top priorities. Joe Biden, who has not yet formally taken over the presidency, talks about his commitments. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has been deadly silent and has not reacted to reports of widespread cyber-attacks on various US facilities and agencies.
“The cybersecurity situation in the United States is not good at all and apparently does not matter to anyone,” Joe Biden said in a part of his speech, taunting Trump, who has only claimed election fraud. There are many things we do not yet know about these cyber-attacks, but what we do know is that this is a very worrying issue.
“I want to be very clear,” Biden said. My government will make cyber security a top priority at every level of government, and we will work to eliminate these security breaches from the day we take over the presidency from the previous government because it is a very fundamental and sensitive issue.
He also warned that hackers who sabotage government agencies or private companies and US infrastructure would have to pay significant costs.
“Our enemies need to know that I, as President, will not remain silent in the face of cyber-attacks on my people, and I have instructed power transfer advisers to inform me as much as possible about this invasion of privacy and attacks on government agencies,” Biden said. Obtain information so that more appropriate planning can be done to ensure extensive US cybersecurity.
Following the attack, the CISA, the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement describing the incident as a significant and ongoing cyber security campaign, and the US Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency noted that the hackers, in addition to critical infrastructure and the private sector, are serious risks to federal, state and local governments.
During his four years in the White House, the Donald Trump administration disregarded cybersecurity and created a lot of problems for the US cyber infrastructure.
Cyber security has been a major challenge for successive US governments, as foreign and domestic hackers increasingly seek to exploit their financial gain or steal for political, revenge, and other motives. Pay information. Although the performance of US presidents can give different marks to their performance in the field of cyber security, but perhaps Donald Trump can be considered the most indifferent US president to this issue.
Another criticism that has always been leveled at Trump, which has now become more pronounced as cyberattacks on US infrastructure are critical, is that he removed the post of cybersecurity coordinator in 2018. Trump’s National Security Council removed the post of cybersecurity coordinator at the time he appointed John Bolton as national security adviser, effectively shutting down the State Department’s cybersecurity bureau in 2017, each of which was effectively one of Them has shattered cybersecurity chains in the United States, and today the country’s security infrastructure has become so vulnerable.
Trump was so oblivious to the issue of cybersecurity in the United States that he tweeted about the dismissal of Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Infrastructure and Space Agency, for just one comment. The US Department of Homeland Security (CISA), affiliated with the Department of Homeland Security, said the November 3 election was the safest presidential election in US history and there was no evidence that ballots had been counted or ballots lost.
Trump also tweeted in response: “There have been widespread irregularities and fraud in the election, including the voting of the dead and the refusal of our campaign observers to enter polling stations, so from now on, Krebs’s duties as director of the US Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency have ended.
However, cyber security, electronic defense, and artificial intelligence are among the slogans that Biden has always emphasized during his election campaign, and now that the Biden government has come to power, special attention is expected to be paid to these issues on the agenda.