The questions artificial intelligence cannot answer

Americans are worried about artificial intelligence (AI), and who can blame them? We are entering a new era of human history. Where is this technology taking us? What can we do about it? What should we do about it? I hear these questions every day in the halls of Congress and coffee shops in Miami.  

I wish I had all the answers. The truth is that there’s a lot we don’t know about AI, largely because it’s evolving so rapidly. Even ChatGPT cannot tell us what to do. Nevertheless, we do know some things, and the American people deserve to know what they are. 

First, we know what AI is. It’s not an alien consciousness, nor is it a magic eight-ball with the solution to every world problem at its fingertips. AI is simply the automated statistical analysis of data. Think of it as a computer program that uses what happened yesterday to predict what will happen today or tomorrow. 

This may not sound like much, but it’s actually a great deal. Because AI can analyze data faster, cheaper and often more accurately than people can — and because it can analyze mass data that no human mind could tackle unaided — it will exponentially improve our decisionmaking abilities. 

This brings us to the second thing we know: AI will revolutionize the information economy, for better and for worse. Americans will benefit when AI makes cancer screens foolproof, as they will when it unleashes next-generation formulation of life-saving biologics — and these examples barely scratch the surface of the programs’ positive potential.  

But Americans will also suffer when AI makes hundreds of thousands white-collar jobs (from translation to accounting to market research) obsolete. It’s no exaggeration to say we’re on the verge of an economic transition as significant as deindustrialization was at the turn of the millennium.  

If we just sit on our hands and watch events unfold, we will generate the same problems our leaders did during the last transition: lost jobs, hollowed-out communities and even more political strife. All of that will further weaken our country at a time when we desperately need strength. Consequently, policymakers must begin the hard work of preparing society for drastic economic change. 

Why not prevent the change from happening, some wonder? The answer is that there is no technology human beings have ever successfully rolled back, and AI is no exception. We can regulate AI in America, but the technology is already transnational. From China to Uganda and everywhere in between, the genie is out of the bottle. Congress can’t stop foreign actors from developing new code, as convenient as that would be. And when those developments occur, we will have to change ourselves accordingly. 

That doesn’t mean we should throw our hands up and despair, though. America is the world leader in the field of AI. To ensure this remains the case, and to show we have learned our lesson from the consequences of U.S. complacency during past technological revolutions, we should take steps to ensure China does not benefit from our progress, whether through theft, coercion or corporate greed.  

This is especially the case when it comes to national security issues. AI will expand military and intelligence analysis capabilities for governments around the world. China and other major adversaries are already working overtime to gain the upper hand. We must be on guard against them — and against smaller states and independent actors whom AI will empower to punch above their weight. 

If all this seems overwhelming, that’s because it is. Just understanding AI, much less controlling it, presents huge challenges to our society. But it’s important to remember that there’s one more thing we know: AI will never replace the human element in policymaking. To those who believe otherwise, I ask: How much would you trust a computer to resolve a nuclear crisis, to adjudicate a case before the Supreme Court or to regulate a new technology — like computer programming itself? 

Coincidentally, the very questions people are asking about AI are the very questions AI cannot answer. Only humans can make the tough calls our country needs to survive and thrive in the 21st century — that much is certain. Whether we will make the right ones, on the other hand, remains to be seen. 

Marco Rubio is the vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and a senior member of the Committee on Foreign Relations.