22 SEPTEMBER 2023 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers, which is both the bargaining agent and professional association for Canadian FSOs, including active-duty and retired employees. Who Can Regulate AI Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI—best known for its generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT—engaged in some private enterprise diplomacy in June, touching down in 10 countries and calling for “global cooperation” to make AI technology safer. In Israel, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, India, South Korea, Japan, SinChina should play a key role in shaping the guardrails. Recent Supreme Court decisions such as West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, among others, have dramatically altered the legal landscape for business law that could regulate AI, “adding even more uncertainty and delay to enforcement actions,” Harvard Business Review wrote in May. These limitations, combined with jostling among Congress, federal agencies, and states to write the rules, suggest that major regulation may come first from outside the U.S. Are China and the CEOs of for-profit AI companies best suited to lead the way? An intersectional bureau view of data included in the DBR. On June 23, the Secretary’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion (S/ODI) released the department’s first-ever DEIA demographic baseline report (DBR) via an interactive dashboard. Designed to be updated annually, this first edition provides a bureau-by-bureau breakdown of FY21 and FY22 data across race, ethnicity, sex, disability, grade/rank, and job series/skill codes. The initiative to transparently share workforce data began in 2020 when a Government Accountability Office report issued that year found that State Department employees from racial and ethnic minorities were less likely to be promoted than their white counterparts. S/ODI says the DBR data will be used to determine if there are anomalies indicative of a barrier to equal employment opportunity. If discovered, barrier analyses may be conducted to see if there are policies that need to be changed to correct disparities in opportunity across demographic groups. The DBR includes all full-time, permanent, direct-hire Civil Service and Foreign Service employees (career and noncareer) as of Sept. 30, 2022, as collected in the department’s Global Employment Management System (GEMS). Contractors, locally employed staff, interns, eligible family members, and reemployed annuitants are not included in the report. First Demographic Baseline Report Released gapore, Indonesia, and Australia, Altman met with students, venture capitalists, and leaders including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog. In May, Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee calling for the regulation of AI and acknowledging the dangers of its unfettered growth, even as his company is projected to bring in $1 billion in revenue in 2024, according to Reuters. He said he wants to work with the government to regulate the technology. During the June tour, he extended the call for regulation. Speaking remotely at an AI conference in Beijing, he said
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