By AB Wire
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Indian American director Rohit Chopra is concerned that a handful of firms and individuals could wield “enormous control over decisions made throughout the world” with advances in artificial intelligence.
Highlighting the way the massive aggregation of consumer data will alter the economy and impact Americans, Chopra told digital publisher Axios Pro Tuesday that he was worried over AI’s “winner-take-all” dimension.
Given its ability to “simulate human interaction in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Chopra said he was highly concerned over fraud, crime and abuse, particularly in functions of financial services like customer service and lending.
But Chopra noted that there are “long-standing laws on the books” that can address this, and “if those laws are changed” they should be put to use as well.
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“Who really is in control of it? Who gets the gains from it? With lots of aggregations from data, much of the gains are not broadly distributed and they go to a handful of people,” said Chopra at the Axios AI+ Summit in Washington, DC.
“You always want to be concerned when there’s any type of market structure that quickly goes to just a few players,” he said.
READ: Senate confirms Rohit Chopra as consumer watchdog (October 5, 2021)
On antitrust, Chopra pointed out that pools of data are assets and that’s a “huge question” for regulators.
“I think there is existing antitrust law to deal with, but how the regulators can find out about them and address them, that’s a big ticket item,” he said.
“But there is this piece of this, are we ever going to put some of the genies back in the bottle?” Chopra said. “… This is a different type of warfare, a different type of human interaction. I really want to make sure whatever we do today, we can stop a lot of that.”
However, Chopra did not favor that there should be a new agency to regulate AI. “If you’re gonna do that, you have to keep the existing ones, too,” he said, adding that “the challenge of regulating data is you’re regulating everything.”
CFPB is one of the newest agencies, he pointed out, and it was formed because there was a lack of accountability for protecting consumers. Anyone who wants to add anew agency needs to figure out what they want to achieve with it first.
It’s difficult to consolidate everything that AI will touch, from national security to mergers and acquisitions, into one agency, he said.
Chopra, 41, was chosen to be the Director of CFPB by President Joe Biden in 2021 three years after he was unanimously confirmed by the US Senate as a Commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission as President Donald Trump’s nominee.
READ: Indian American Rohit Chopra to lead consumer bureau (January 18, 2021)
Chopra previously served at the CFPB from 2010 to 2015. In 2011, the Secretary of the Treasury designated him as the agency’s student loan ombudsman, where he led the Bureau’s efforts on student lending issues.
Prior to his government service, Chopra worked at McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy, where he worked in the financial services, health care, and consumer technology sectors.
Chopra holds a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
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