television companies and more including buckeye broadband. ♪ >> buckeye broadband sports c-span as a public service along with these other television providers, giving you a front row seat to democracy. >> former leaders at google, twitter, and the fcc are among the panelists who discussed artificial intelligence innovations, and public responsibility around its usage in washington, d.c. this is about half an hour.

>> i want to welcome everyone to our first panel. amazing panel. probably the most important topic in recent history. the emergents of ai and generative ai language models and what it means to our industry, what it means to the country and as we establish a center for public policy and responsibility through encompasses 501(c)(3) foundation, what we hope to do is to bring thought leaders together and probably there's no more impressive group of thought leaders than what we have on

stage. milo who helped lead google fiber and google wireless and has tremendous background in the industry and continues as a what should i say, start-up, engineer? >> no comment. >> former fcc chairwoman, commissioner, south carolina commissioner, just a tremendous friend, competition has worked in advisory roles with the department of defense as it relates to ai and cybersecurity but from the government leader and one with experience and one who can speak for communities and -- and organizations around the country we are very pleased to have minon work with us in

incompas. i used to say he was an old friend but then congressman markie, in the early days of the formation of policies that brought this competition and cable and satellite and wireless, 1996 telecommunications act, net neutrality work at the fcc and then he went onto establish the government affairs offices for twitter not only in the united states and washington but around the world and now heads up a wise group called the blue aisle group and we are pleased to have colin, his long-thoughtful policy advice, leadership,

guidance and then from granite telecommunication who is can tell us from the industry and who is serving both government and commercial enterprises around the country, if you think of wal-mart, walgreens, every post office, cvs, burger king, the retail multilocation market, granite touches almost everything everywhere. so we are pleased and proud to have everyone on this panel as we talk about ai and how we should approach it. what are the enduring principles to this new -- new application of technology that is coming across the country. so i'm going to -- milo, we will start with you and go down to list. any key issues that you want to point out or principles of how

we should approach ai from a public policy from an industry best practices and what are the big issues that you see coming ahead? >> well, that was a specific question. >> yes. [laughter] >> i think, you know, i'm old. i remember working on internet technology back in the days before the web and in those days you had to know a lot about the network in order to use it, right, we moved files, we had e-mail, before the domain name system, et cetera. and then the browser showed up and the browser made it raze to -- easy to use the internet without having to know about it. ai has been around for a long time, my old company, virtually every product that google makes,

made has ai in it but the large language models that are out right now have now made it easy to use ai without having to be a tense flow programmer or pie towards engineer, et cetera. i think you're going see a whole set of changes where you're going to have people enabled by these kind of tools to do things that only experts could do before and given this is encompass and about competition it's really going to bring a lot more competition into the space, so photographers, for example, who go out and do shoots for commercial clients, right, they want a picture of a certain set of things, well, you're now going to have a whole set of people competing for that business who never used a camera. at google there were some of the best engineers in terms of power

management and data service and then they came out with a ai model that not only matched but exceeded that performance and so you don't -- now you don't necessarily -- >> check out these pictures. [laughter] >> my pixel again. now you end up with this leveling where companies don't necessarily have to go, have the elite engineers anymore because you've got the new tools that bring you in a competitive range so i think there's a great opportunity for people to up skill their what they work on and improve productivity and for companies to compete in a more aggressive way. >> mignon, as you think what are the guardrails in public policy and concerns that you might have or the great benefits and

opportunities that you see? >> well, good morning, everyone. i've got -- as you can tell new hardware, software or forgive me for limping in. but i think it's somehow symbolic that i'm limping in and i say that and i'm going to take some liberties with your question if you would allow me to because when i think about the panel today i cannot help but think about what i've been doing almost 20 years of my life and that's regulation and when you talk about efficiencies and accuracies and innovation and when we talk about ai, how does that become ubiquitous and standard inside of government from a regulatory perspective? i mean, what are we going to see there? how can we keep up? when i came in, you know, in regulation in '98 it seemed very analog, very analog and even

then we were speaking about, you know, how we moved forward and we keep up with you guys in terms of innovation. now that i can't even -- i hate to say on steroids but i'm not. now i'm in a widespread, so much of a challenge, so if i can take a few liberties, you know, with your underlying question, really how does government keep up and how does government leverage technology itself. how do we better adopt it when it comes to decision-making, you know, how do we better leverage to keep up with you guys. all of those things are really important and as we continue talking and maybe i will answer your question later, i really wanted, you know, to set the stage there because i really think, you know, from in and of itself cannot divorce itself not only with keeping up with you but how you guys process and how

this ai evolution should become internal and embedded within us. >> colin., i'm -- as i think through your role in the early legislation for competitive policy across every network and platform and policy formation on the internet, are there enduring principthat is you can apply to ai that could be insightful to the audience today and establish the center to guide us our work. i was just reflecting on what milo was saying about the early internet days and one to have things that i keep coming back

to when i think about ai as a revolutionary technology from a consumer standpoint is that oftentimes revolutionary technologies bring some enthusiasm, some trepidation, anxiety and phil zimmerman released pgp encryption onto a used network and quickly found itself into the growing internet. so pgp stood for pretty good privacy. in 1991, encryption was treated

under regulation as ammunition. it was treated like rocket launchers or grenades and you needed an export license to push commercial encryption outside of the united states. phil zimmerman found himself under federal investigation for violating export controls. and when that pgp upload occurred of that strong encryption law enforcement, the intelligence community and a variety of other players in policy-making circles were very concerned. why because with that technology terrorists could use it, organized crimes syndicates could use it and child predators and there was a parade of horribles and congress decided ultimately not to break encryption and to dumb it down

so to speak but congress took note of the concerns in 1994 for law enforcement act which gave access to digital communications under valid law enforcement requests because of unbreakable encryption arriving congress had to enact a digital copyright act in 1998 and talk about the affirmative defenses that would go to digital rights management that included strong encryption, so congress responded and helped to create a framework not through one am omnibus law but series of laws and when i look that chat gbt was launched into the wild, when you see law enforcement community and there's a parade of horribles that could spin out of that that are nontrivial, you know, the

world is new again and so there is an element of what we are seeing in policymaking debates where a new framework may be needed, issues that had been settled for the previous era will need to be revisited including copyright licensing, including concerns about national security, but as with any technology and the values you asked about, chip, the values we care about, the human values that should animate technology are immutable, so even as the technology changes, the core values of the underlying communications act, diversity, localism, universal service as augmented in the telecom act in 1996 by adding values of competition and embrace of innovation and global markets, those values we retain even as the technology changes but we have to come up with a

framework that embraces the benefits of the new technology while being open-eyed as i said to the nontrivial downside consequences as well and build in protections as best we can. >> no one is like granite more connected to a wide diversity of businesses around the country. as you talk to your customers, what are the application and the services, the benefits and the network optimization that you think would be important with ai, rob, ceo of granite, one of the leading philanthropists in the country cares deeply about cancer and cancer research. one of our advisers that is joining the encompass center is dr. bobby who is the current president of the university of arizona but path president and ceo of the largest cancer research center in the world at

the texas medical center. md anderson and we have tremendous benefits that, i think, from a granite perspective about what you care about philanthropically and health research but your business customers. tell me what you're hearing and what you think ai means to your customers? >> absolutely. first off, thank you so much for having me, thank you for the incompas team. with regard to granite health communications i want to start by giving background about what exactly granite does. so granite started years ago as really aggregating phone line for our customers and what we really have focused on is listening to our customers over time our customers came.

both from a back end but what that means from us we are using automation to enable efficiencies across on one end and the vast amount of data that our customers have coming from all the data scenes were able to use ai in one platform and able to use that information to be able to tell customers, hey, this what has been going on, they are able to use or make their decisions, that's what is

happening on the back end. we areouting automation to really enhance our provisioning enhance our troubleshooting, enhance configuration all to really minimize human error, so our customers are getting a better experience at the end of the day. on the flip side our customers seeing us do on the front end and they want to see on the backside. a new platform 360 which is using ai to provide customers with all of the information that they need at fingertips instead of having to reach out, wait for response and look at the data especially in our case when we have customers that have locations across the united states. they don't want that raw data. some of them do. they can make that analysis but what they are really looking for is a partner, leveraging ai, leveraging technology, provide them with the solution and all this ai technology being able to

organize data that way is giving us the ability to provide our customers with the upmost customer experience but also to help them drive and we have always been customer driven on ai and other as well. >> i will leave you with two words for the day? >> yes. >> i usually do one word but it's two words today. avoid, regret. what we want to do is avoid and regreat. we want to put necessary guardrails as regulators as business owners and what we don't want to do come back and say, we should have, could have. at end of the day it's going to take a community to do that. a vision to recognize that we really -- we want to do no harm,

you know, we want to enable. we want to leverage innovation. but if a significant vulnerable sector of our population is harmed by all of this, we are going to have problems in the long-term and avoiding regrets i think is what i want to leave with this sort of answer the question. >> go ahead. i'm not suggesting that all guardrails are bad but depending on guardrails to prevent bad things from happening with information probably not a wise strategy. what i mean by that is betting on ignorance which is what you're doing by saying we're going to try and prevent the tools from giving people information that could be used in bad ways

>> it's also been used to do bad things. ai is going to be the same way. the other thing, i think, that guardrails sometimes can do is cause the researchers to feel like they don't have to have quite so much responsibility about the products they put out because after -- so you think guardrails would

create that part of it? >> this is actually very good. this will tell you what we will be doing in the years to come. are a transformational. during the maven controversy at google i remember having this conversation with finger leader and he said, well, the reason why the researchers are so upset about this is they feel like physicists in the 40's and 50's, they didn't want their work used for nuclear weapons and i said, well, i actually worked on nuclear weapons at livermoore when i was in school at cal and we never opened -- like, you know, it's one thing to say we are going to publish

everything, make everything available and then it's up to the government to prevent bad things from being done with that information. i just don't think government can do that and that's what i mean. >> and i guess finally learn how to use the mic, sorry, and i guess my definition and how i interpret that term in terms of guardrails is more of a check-in balance. it's more of every one of us including government understanding what their role is, what their responsibilities are and this is not a responsibility free-zone and if we all recognize that and then it's not inhibiting, it's not, you know, tampering competition, it's enabling in a responsible way. you can tell we know each other. >> yeah. >> colin. >> i will also say we don't need

laws for good ethical people. we pass laws for the people who are going to cross ethical lines who are attempted too greatly to do so perhaps and so oftentimes those guardrails are there not for the 90-some percent of the people who will go about their daily lives or their commercial lives and uphold ethical values, it's their for those who might transgress them. the second reason why there are guardrails sometimes is to deal with ain'tra industry relationships and those guardrails are competitive guardrails, they are guardrails that compel openness and opportunities for greater competition, greater consumer choice and so the irony is sometimes you need regulation to

enhance competition and that's an irony but it's quite often true. >> as we had the conversation income to asses history we were the first in 1981 to advocate for competition in telecommunications and the then nathan long distance industry which became the internet backbone of our networks and under the open networks is the inner connection of networks as we got into the internet age, open internet because that openness, the access of anyone to content everywhere and commercial enterprises from small to large to have access to a worldwide market with equal reciprocity and equal access in open internet principle was

something incopas advocated, now we get to ai, how can we have the most open ai, the most competitive ai with the safety and responsibility that we can try to create and why incopas uniquely positioned for the discussion, debate or to make recommendations to policymakers and our membership is fairly unique in washington. we have the leading technology companies that have been on the forefront of developing degenerative ai models, microsoft, google, amazon, meta, and we have the competitive infrastructure to data centers to national fiber to national tower to 5g to satellite, to fixed wireless, to local fiber. i have everything in the ecosystem, the infrastructure

and the applications and the content to kind of know the critical infrastructure, how do we protect and secure that aspect of what will be deployed and -- and the applications that will come to every user of our networks and enabled by the networks, the advanced applications of ai that will be enabled by the networks for those who are creating these wonderful sometimes scary to us applications. so i think we are uniquely positioned, we want to work with regional hubs of universities, whether it's my alma mater oma that just started, just announced, the intelligence center working with the department of defense, the university of arizona and all that they represent and their med school, law school business

school, land grant, engineering, but how do we have regional hub that we can bring about stakeholders not only here in dc within the industry but in the heartland and middle america to tell the benefits and do the research and create the curriculum and the workforce training around ai so that we can truly lead globally internationally in the competitiveness maximize the benefits, minimize the harms and this panel kind of represents the thought leadership that we hoped, that we can bring to the debate, the house, senator schumer has had a thoughtful group, bipartisan group of members and industry coming in to begin the early discussions, kind of reminds me of the early work of the 1990's act, how do you get everybody in the room to begin driving what you hope will

eventually be a consensus of a policy framework and is i'm going to close with this, any -- any policy recommendations, principles or any -- what is the next cool grade application that you may have heard about or you may want to tell the crowd is coming as it relates to ai? i'm going to start with you and work our way back this way. >> sounds good. in terms of any policy that are going to be really important first and foremost is education and chaining. >> as you saw the wave of computer science, curriculum, i think we will need to see a wave of ai training or training to be brought into the quick curriculum as well like this is here to stay and growing and it's made such extensive progress in just the last couple of years so that really on the education side but on the

training side with the workforce not everybody needs to be an expert in ai but what we are really working on doing especially as we've been introducing all this new automation at granite and all the new different machine learning operations is really using teammates on how to leverage them. they don't need to be an expert on how it works on the back end of it all but we can teach them all the cool things they can do to put them in a better position to support our customers so from a policy standpoint i think it's really education and training, it's something that i'm really looking forward seeing what the committee comes out with and how that's going to revolutionize the new regulation. >> in my experience, you know, sort of successful legislation or successful regulation has to go through 3 stages. first is an education stage.

so understanding and appreciating what the technology brings, understanding how it works, understanding what you believe to be the implications. the second stage is after educate is activate where you activate supporters, people who feel similarly, build coalitions and then the third stage is to legislate. i think we need to take to heart milo's caution about the limits of government in quote, unquote solving problems. but i feel we are very much in the education stage of this debate still and we need to learn more. but we need to learn fast because the technology is advancing so rapidly and i think there's great promise with ai technologies but there's also potential peril and the more we learn and the more we stress test each other's theories and

presumptions, the better we will be at the activate and legislate stage. >> so chip, i think one of the things i really have been thinking about this for a number of years there is no institution of higher learning. there is no government entity that is divorced or that cannot contribute to the enhancement of education and training in this country. so that makes the opportunities boundless that geographically and otherwise. there is no subject matter that cannot benefit, you know, can't be enhanced, cannot contribute to this debate so an ai folks curriculum no matter what your major is, no matter where you are i think would be helpful in creating life-long learning opportunities. that's important. we have to do so and approach

these things ethically and responsibly and again educational institutions and the like are uniquely, i think, situated to help educate when it comes to that and help enhance that. let's not forget, let's not forget, you know, intellectual property rights, let's not forget the prospect of international collaboration, all of these things antitrust, i can go on because i have the list in red, you know, all of the things are important but let's not forget the power of public-private partnerships and those p's are multiple, local local, state local, you know, national and yes, international, all of these things, i think, have the prospect of establishing the right type of balance when it comes to guardrails and other responsibilities, milo. and it really honestly i think makes our future more bright, thank you.

>> milo, i'm going to let you close with the most insightful comments. >> i don't know that i can get you that. do i think that one of the great opportunities before us is actually reforming education and higher ed. the thing that has consistently shown to raise kids test scores and be effective in learning is one-on-one tutoring. and i think ai has the ability to potentially take that and make that available to a vast number of people and students that can't afford to do it, can't afford to pay for that and i think that's going to be an incredible opportunity if our systems are able to handle it

because that also challenges a number of structures and a number of ways that we have educated in the past. i think there's great opportunities. the one other thing i will just say is the rate of change and the technology is really increasing. if you think the level of change that you've seen today is high there are there are huge amounts of capital flowing into not just the hardware but also the companies who are building new applications and new capabilities with the technology and so and it's not going to be stable for a very long time and so the question is really about how can you take advantage of that so that your business, your opportunity can lever that in a way that is effective for you, i

do think there's a certain amount of fear because this is not ai is not coming for the job of the plummer or the lektion, it's coming for bringing new competition in the white collar, in the administrative, in the knowledge work and that really has not happened before and i think it's going to be interesting to see how that shapes out. >> as we close i'm very excited about the establishment, the creation of the center within incompas. i'm very excited that leaders like milo and mignon and colin and others have agreed to serve on the advisory board, our mission is to promote competition, innovation and technology and in networks. we want to bring the benefits of

those principles to all parts of the country and just to close with one example in my home state of mississippi how i believe ai will -- will have a broad benefit in states like mine in rural parts of the country. aws just announced two major data centers similar between 10 to $16 billion of investments. it's modernizing all of the electricity infrastructure of our state, multibillion dollars will go in to solar and wind and -- and the power needed for the data centers and the data centers will primarily be running large language models improving ai applications in every sector and that's in jackson, mississippi. and what we've seen where those data centers locate is it becomes the equivalent of the

old-world port city, it becomes the modern port city where commerce and education and research all colocate around it and the distribution networks locate around it and so that's in my home state and so i'm very proud that we can do this with incompas, that we can add to the debate. i think we are uniquely positioned and we have a defined core value that serves this mission well, so i'm very proud to announce today the creation of the -- the ai public policy and responsibility center and i'm very proud to have my friends on the -- on the platform here to join us in that effort, so thank y'all.

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