Biden Administration policy advisors are seeking input for drafting an AI Bill of Rights for the American people.

 White House: Americans Need AI Bill of Rights for Protections

An opinion piece written recently by two White House advisors has garnered a lot of the AI world’s attention.

Mainly the attention was due to the headline that wired.com published along with the piece. “Americans Need An AI Bill Of Rights” according to the piece by Eric Landers and Alondra Nelson. Landers is director and Nelson is the deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

In their article, the advisors point out that one of the leading problems they are seeing with AI, especially in the U.S., is poor training of Algorithms. And poor training leads to huge disparities in our societies when algorithms are running so many things currently.

From the article:

Training machines based on earlier examples can embed past prejudice and enable present-day discrimination. Hiring tools that learn the features of a company’s employees can reject applicants who are dissimilar from existing staff despite being well qualified—for example, women computer programmers.

Mortgage approval algorithms to determine credit worthiness can readily infer that certain home zip codes are correlated with race and poverty, extending decades of housing discrimination into the digital age. AI can recommend medical support for groups that access hospital services most often, rather than those who need them most. Training AI indiscriminately on internet conversations can result in “sentiment analysis” that views the words “Black,” “Jew,” and “gay” as negative.

The pair raised the issue regarding privacy and transparency that these technologies take away from our lives. Imagine China’s number of municipal cameras and compare those state-run systems to our private doorbell cameras. They are run on a system as well. But who views your doorbell videos besides you?

The writers say the technologies should be required to treat everyone fairly—and the only way to ensure that is through laws and ethics codes.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is developing the bill of rights in collaboration with government officials, university advisors, and business leaders, as well as private citizens. They are looking for input:

Technology can only work for everyone if everyone is included, so we want to hear from and engage with everyone. You can email us directly at ai-equity@ostp.eop.gov.

The Biden Administration also seeks input from human resources professionals who use hiring software and IT professionals and consumers who build or use AI technologies.

read more at wired.com