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 AI 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 AI hacking event supported by the White House. Chowdhury's work in the field of responsible AI—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."
