I’m often asked during interviews and panels whether AI should be regulated – More specifically, I’m asked, “Will AI be regulated?”.

In November 1863, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, in possibly the most significant letter ever written to the American people, The Gettysburg Address, pinned the following:
“that these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”

Since then, We have seen cases where the government has put its people first. Two small examples and possibly one humongous one come to mind:

1) When it was determined that cars caused pollution, we didn’t prohibit using all cars. Instead, we invested in research and decided that the lead in gasoline was the primary contributor to emission pollution. And then, in 1970, congress passed the landmark Clean Air Act and gave the newly formed EPA the legal authority to regulate pollution from cars and other forms of transportation. Decades later, we have the ultimate solution in electric cars.

2) Before the FDA got involved, the genuine ingredients and food content descriptions needed to be more readily disclosed. Like AI algorithms today, this was also a black-box scenario where the people most impacted by false advertisements of food labeling were misled by the corporations that produced and marketed food products. So, people already diagnosed with severe illnesses like diabetes were misled to believe that certain sugar-filled products were sugar-free. When, in truth, they weren’t.

The Humongous One – We, as Americans, hold our Constitution up as the symbol of democracy. As remarkable as it was, it was deeply flawed. The Constitution specified what the government could do but didn’t specify what it could not do. The same issue is occurring with AI. Many best practices and normative guidance determine AI algorithms’ functional
and accuracy levels, but little to no policy defines what “AI cannot do.” More importantly, the Constitution only applied to some. The term “consent of the governed” applied to white men only. Specifically, the Constitution didn’t include a particular bill of individual rights. Shortly after the ratification of the Constitution, Americans adopted a Bill of Rights to guard against the powerful government — enumerating guarantees such as freedom of expression and assembly, rights to due process and fair trials, and protection against unreasonable search and seizure. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery – the 14th Amendment gave Black People in America the right to due process – and the 15th Amendment gave Blacks the right to vote. By far, the marginalized group that is adversely impacted by bias algorithms is “Black people.”  WHO WILL ARGUE?
We need a “People-first legal framework with the individual’s rights as the central tenet of its constructs.”
OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE