Daily Herald opinion: Pritzker’s AI Cabinet: New agency has promising mission, difficult challenges
Illinois took a strong step in July toward monitoring and controlling the risks of artificial intelligence development. This week, Gov. JB Pritzker signed an executive order that may appear to be a logical next step - the creation of an AI Cabinet tasked with identifying risks of the technologies and producing recommendations to address them.
To the extent that it accomplishes that broad goal, the AI Cabinet can prove to be a good idea. But much depends on ensuring that this new agency complements and advances the goals of the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act and does not complicate or interfere with the law.
Pritzker said the AI Cabinet will comprise a cross section of experts and agency representatives with a dictate to develop policy and procedure recommendations that prepare for and respond to AI risks to the safety of Illinois residents, protect public assets and infrastructure and evaluate the feasibility of regulatory actions involving AI technologies.
These are important goals, to be sure, and they seem to grow more urgent daily as rapidly advancing AI capabilities have even top experts in the field expressing concerns about the ability to harness its potential.
But at the same time, the state and the nation face a very real conflict in the management of AI. President Trump’s almost limitless faith in the technology and his dismissal of critics are short-sighted and unhelpful, but he is right about one thing. Slowing our development of AI tools while our economic and political adversaries continue apace presents real risks.
As Illinois State Rep. Jeff Keicher, a Sycamore Republican, said in a statement following Pritzker’s order, “If the United States, and Illinois as a serious industrial and research state, treats AI as something to brake while others treat it as something to field, we will not get a safer world. We will get a world in which the least accountable actors have the most capable systems.”
Illinois’ new law already places important responsibilities on AI developers, requiring them to publish an outline of potential “catastrophic risk” and to promptly report incidents that could lead to harm for Illinois citizens or businesses. Importantly, it also requires annual third-party audits that report AI incidents and identify emerging risks.
If Pritzker’s AI Cabinet’s activities are clearly monitored and transparent, and if it has specific reporting demands and deadlines, it can be a useful tool of the new law. Its greatest challenge, as with every measure seeking to keep AI development in check, will be to find ways to prevent potential harm while enabling development of the technology not just to keep pace with the rest of the world but to set it.