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Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to Fill Possible Policy Gaps

Screenshot from the fact sheet of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Last October, the Biden-Harris administration released a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights in anticipation of the need to protect the civil rights of Americans against big technology intrusions. Although there are already many protections in place, the Blueprint was developed to “inform policy-making to fill those gaps” where there aren’t any clear or designated policies. It provides five basic protections:

  • Safe and Effective Systems: You should be protected from unsafe or ineffective systems.
  • Algorithmic Discrimination Protections: You should not face discrimination by algorithms and systems should be used and designed in an equitable way.
  • Data Privacy: You should be protected from abusive data practices via built-in protections and you should have agency over how data about you is used.
  • Notice and Explanation: You should know that an automated system is being used and understand how and why it contributes to outcomes that impact you.
  • Alternative Options: You should be able to opt out, where appropriate, and have access to a person who can quickly consider and remedy problems you encounter.

At that same time, the White House also announced actions to be taken within the government in support of the Blueprint that would immediately assist citizens across vocations in education, health care, technology and so forth. This is what the White House has in store in education for 2023:

Protecting students and supporting educators:

  • To guide schools in the use of AI, the Department of Education will release recommendations on the use of AI for teaching and learning by early 2023. These recommendations will: give educators, parents and caregivers, students, and communities tools to leverage AI to advance universal design for learning; define specifications for the safety, fairness, and efficacy of AI models used within education; and introduce guidelines and guardrails that build on existing education data privacy regulations as well as introduce new policies to support schools in protecting students when using AI.

I look forward to reading what the Department of Education will release this year.

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The Process by Which I Came to AI and Started Down a Path of Study

Before I started the IP&T 520 class this Spring Term (2021), I didn’t even have the idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in my head as a way to help with lifelong education. I just knew that there were some instructional design theories still undiscovered—according to Elder L. Tom Perry (1996)—and I wanted to find out what they were. As I stated in my Letter of Intent for my application to the IP&T program: As I’ve thought more about the quote from Elder Perry, I imagine that these “new” designs and learning theories will probably be centered around the personal learning environments of the individual and the integration of these personal learnings into a community of learners. 

About 15 years ago I took a class from Dr. Andrew Gibbons at BYU and became interested in design layers and design languages. I knew when I came back for a PhD that I wanted to look more into these areas as possible ways to help structure learning. I also came to this 520 class with Mary Parker Follett’s (1918, 1924),  observations about teaching and learning, and the teacher/student relation. I knew that I wanted to incorporate her ideas into anything that I would develop as a theory of design, and/or that the design theories I was looking for would possess a semblance of her ideas. 

As I mentioned in my 520 journal, my idea for AI in education and to find out if/how it is used, came about not from reading about it for education. I wanted a way for me to use AI to act as a memory storage and retrieval unit with some design layers mixed in to keep everything straight—and I wanted my “Aha!” learning moments to be preserved. I wanted AI technology to hold onto things that I had learned previously and preserve the emotional reactions from the moment when the learning had occurred. In tandem with the functions of this tool, I wanted AI to bring to mind—such as a periodical reminder through Siri or Alexa— things I had committed to memory over time so I could hang on to the learnings. 

When we were assigned in class to officially Tell Heather What You Will Do for Your Final Project I came up with the following: I want to write a literature review discussing AI as a curation tool for niche/personalized education and/or the roles of AI in Education, and develop ideas about design layers that may be involved in using such a tool.