Member Perspective: An Excerpt from the National AI Advisory Committee Year One Report
Janet Haven, Executive Director, Data & Society
Liz O’Sullivan, CEO, Vera
Frank Pasquale, Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Amanda Ballantyne, Director, Technology Institute, AFL-CIO
The views expressed below are made in the authors’ capacities as individual members of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee (NAIAC); this statement, excerpted from the public draft of the NAIAC’s first year report, represents the authors’ joint submission to the member perspectives section of the report.
As these are individual member perspectives, the views expressed below do not represent the views of the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee as a whole or its subcommittees, the National Institute of Science and Technology, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of State, the Attorney General, the Office of National Intelligence, the Initiative Office, the president, or the Department of Commerce.
Many of the recommendations put forward in the NAIAC’s first year report are ones we’re pleased to see advance, and are valuable to address immediate needs related to advancing federal AI policy. However, the challenges that we face related to AI governance are not only immediate and tactical. This committee should be working through a strategic lens, building on a set of core values that are resilient to the ever-changing nature of technology. This is why we advocated to anchor this committee’s work in a foundational rights-based framework, like the one laid out in Office of Science and Technology Policy’s October 2022 Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. While we’re pleased to see the Blueprint referenced in this report, this is insufficient.
For the NAIAC to meet this critical moment, the committee should clearly articulate a commitment to a people-first, rights-respecting American AI strategy. The United States should lead from a position that prioritizes civil and human rights over corporate concerns. Given the immense concentration of money, data, compute, and talent amassed by AI companies and the overwhelming evidence of societal impact, this requires more than the positive and important steps undertaken by agencies and through executive orders that we’ve seen over the past year. Congress needs to enact legislation, starting with the most basic comprehensive data privacy protections, to protect citizens and non-citizens alike from the AI harms already identified through a growing field of research; beyond that, we need to design comprehensive systems of accountable governance that allow values-based, rights-respecting AI to thrive. Those should include badly needed new methods to create accountability in AI lifecycles, such as participatory, public interest audits and impact assessments with mechanisms for mitigation and redress of harms.
Building on such commitments, the committee should address critical gaps in our work in the coming years. The lack of attention in this report to the pressing issue of AI use within the criminal legal system must be corrected; the mandated Law Enforcement sub-committee needs to be convened immediately. We need to address new protections for workers, particularly those in low-wage and precarious work, who are increasingly hired, fired, surveilled, and managed by algorithmic systems. And this committee should investigate the unfolding societal impacts of anthropomorphized and increasingly ubiquitous — but also increasingly invisible — AI systems in a range of areas, particularly those where historically vulnerable and marginalized groups may be most affected: care work, education, health care access, public benefits, and housing to name only a few.
Finally, the members of the NAIAC hold a range of views on AI governance. The public deserves to see those differences articulated, to assess them, and to add their own voices. To this end, this committee must undertake much more public engagement and public deliberation in the coming two years. We strongly believe it is through that process that members of this committee who want to see meaningful action can promote a focus on human and civil rights, including worker rights, in the NAIAC reports and recommendations ahead.
