“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
That quote has been attributed to Desmond Tutu, Wendell Philips and Thomas Jefferson, among others. (Thanks to Anna Berkes for trying to get to the bottom of who said it first—it looks like it wasn’t any of them.)
Whoever said it, it’s on my mind after reading about the launch of the “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights: A Vision for Protecting our Civil Rights in the Algorithmic Age.” WIRED magazine said it didn’t have teeth (you can read the government document here).
What raised an eyebrow for me was that the publisher, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), claimed this:
“We led a year-long process to develop this framework, diving deeply into how people across the country are affected by these systems. People from many backgrounds offered input through panel discussions, public listening sessions, meetings, a formal request for information, and other outreach formats.”
And then I saw that “The OSTP received emails from 150 people about its project and heard from about 130 additional individuals, businesses and organizations that responded to a request for information earlier in the year.”
So after a public process to gather information, OSTP only received 280 responses out of 335M people in the US. Babies and children aside, that’s still a very, very low response rate!
It’s striking for a few reasons.
The first comes from OSTP itself: “Algorithms used across many sectors are plagued by bias and discrimination, and too often developed without regard to their real-world consequences and without the input of the people who will have to live with their results.”
So their intentions were seemingly good. Yet with such a small response rate, either they were insincere—e.g. “Well, we posted a call for public notice and no one responded.” Or they were ineffective—e.g. it was posted on The White House website, but where/how was it distributed? Did you know about it?
Another thought circles back to the opening “eternal vigilance” quote. Are we like the frog in the pot, not realizing the water is sensing our every move and thought?
For business owners, one thing is for sure, AI will be (and already is) changing everything.
Much is for the good—it makes so many things so much easier. In marketing that’s everything from writing to posting on social media to further narrowing and measuring your target audience. Yet there’s plenty of room for bad, too. Also from marketing—gathering and sharing too much personal information and furthering stereotypes with bias-embedded data.
Somewhere between “head in the sand” and “the sky is falling” is a call to action, to research and learn as much as you can now. I turn to WIRED magazine and I just signed up to receive “news briefings” from The White House.
Do you have great resources you follow and trust about what’s coming for AI?