Some of my co-workers published a sponsored piece in the Atlantic calling for a national AI strategy, which was tied in to some discussions at the Washington Ideas event.

I'm 100% on board with the US having a strategy, but I want to offer one caveat: "comprehensive national strategies" are susceptible to becoming top-down, centralized plans, which I think is dangerous.

I'm generally disinclined to centralized planning, for both efficiency and philosophical reasons. I'm not going to take the time now to explain why; I doubt anything I could scratch out here would shift people very much along any kind of Keynes-Hayek spectrum.

So why am I bothering to bring this up? Mostly because I think it would be especially ill-conceived to adopt central planning when it comes to AI. The recent progress in AI has been largely a result of abandoning top-down techniques in favor of bottom-up ones. We've abandoned hand-coded visual feature detectors for convolutional neural networks. We've abandoned human-engineered grammar models for statistical machine translation. In one discipline after another emergent behavior has outpaced decades worth of expert-designed techniques. To layer top-down policy-making on a field built of bottom-up science would be a waste, and an ironic one at that.

PS Having spoken to two of the three authors of this piece, I don't mean to imply that they support centralized planning of the AI industry. This is just something I would be on guard against.