Washington, DC, has been searching for years for an artificial intelligence expert to help it navigate a world where law degrees and AI models could potentially power every aspect of our lives. This week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Homeland Security’s counter-hacking arm, announced it had named its first director.
In an announcement shared with Axios on Thursday, CISA named Lisa Einstein as the organization’s first AI chief. Einstein comes from the think tank world and has already advised CISA on how to address AI threats and helped test AI cybersecurity tools for the White House.
She also worked on a four-hour tabletop game that brought together 50 representatives from governments and companies like Microsoft and Nvidia, where the aim of the game was to work as a team to solve an AI security incident.
“Only by working together and prioritizing safety, security, and reliability can we realize the benefits of AI and avoid the harms that can come from its malfunctions and misuse. I am honored to serve as part of the dedicated and talented CISA team as we work on this important challenge,” Einstein said in an official statement about his appointment.
AI and the threats it poses are on everyone’s mind in Washington. President Biden has Mission: Impossible – Dead ReckoningBut government agencies that take computers seriously were concerned about the threat of AI and machine learning long before Biden started watching Tom Cruise.
CISA Director Jen Easterly has publicly compared AI to nuclear weapons, with the big difference being that the people who built them showed some restraint. “If you think about it, the most powerful technology of the last century was arguably nuclear weapons. The most powerful technology of this century is artificial intelligence,” Easterly said in a speech to the National Press Foundation in April 2023.
“Nuclear weapons were built by governments that had an incentive to keep them safe. The incentive of those developing AI is maximizing profits and business competition.”
