Dr. Rumman Chowdhury had three minutes to speak and wanted to make them count. It was mid-September and the data scientist was in the Kennedy Caucus Room for the Senate's first AI Insight Forum. Chowdhury and 21 other who's who from the tech world-including Silicon Valley titans, like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, as well as Al experts, civil society leaders, and academics-were having a closed-door conversation about the risks, harms, and impact of AI, in front of more than 60 senators.
It wasn't the first time Chowdhury was summoned by politicians to talk about artificial intelligence. There was her testimony in July of this year in front of Congress. In August, she co-led an Al hacking event supported by the White House. Chowdhury's work in the field of responsible Al-an approach to developing the technology in an ethical way-even earned her a spot on TIME magazine's list of "Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence."
But convincing power players that principled guardrails are needed has proved a challenge for Chowdhury. "One of the difficulties of responsible Al is that when we've done our job well, nothing happens," she says. "The absence of harm-something we don't always notice-is our success story. Therefore, it's difficult then to explain our value. We are the reason things get better because we are the reason things aren't worse."
At the Forum, Chowdhury stood out as one of the few women of color in the room. But with her often brightly colored hair and penchant for Japanese menswear, it isn't blending into the mass of white men in bland suits that Chowdhury is interested in. And so, with her three minutes ticking, she looked at the senators, and stated her case: "Diverse issues with large-scale [AI] models are best solved by having more diverse people contributing to the solutions."
This story is from the The Power Issue 2023 edition of Marie Claire - US.
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This story is from the The Power Issue 2023 edition of Marie Claire - US.
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