The White House plans to craft an AI Bill of Rights

The Future. With AI starting to become ubiquitous, the White House thinks it’s high time to start carving protections for users. It released a layout for a Bill of Rights that would try to govern how AI systems are developed. Although the federal government won’t be able to legally enforce the principles, several use cases for how AI can negatively impact people’s health and quality of life may force Congress to codify it into law.

Programmed protection

According to Axios, here are the main points that the Biden administration’s Office of Science & Technology outlined in “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights”:

• The systems should be safe and effective, with input on them given by various communities to ensure that blindspots are addressed.

• There should be no discrimination built into the algorithms, and companies should continually monitor and test the systems to ensure they stay that way.

• Users should know when an AI system is using their data and what it means for the system to use it — nothing should be left up to assumption.

• Privacy is paramount, so users should be protected from “abusive data practices” and have control over how their data is used.

• Users should be able to opt-out of their data being included in the systems (and be able to do so by talking to an actual person).

The White House said that federal agencies using AI systems would soon adhere to all these principles, encouraging private companies to follow suit. It won’t be able to actually enforce their adoption in the private sector, but government agencies will still be monitoring them.

Crowdsourced rights

While the White House hopes to be an authority in AI regulation, it’s not the first entity to start thinking about reigning in the tech’s power.

• IBM published a set of principles back in 2017, which proposed that companies (or the AI systems themselves) should be able to explain how their underlying algorithms work.

• The EU also did so in 2019, calling for “trustworthy AI” built on a number of ethical principles.

• And the Vatican — yes, the Vatican — wrote a “framework” that pushed for AI to be developed in such a way that it protects the “the rights and the freedom of individuals so they are not discriminated against by algorithms.”

And with AI systems soon to be powering humanoid robots, these rules can’t be implemented soon enough.