Preparing people to build AI was also a question of preparing them to recognize harm in the White House report released on October 12, 2016. Its education recommendation placed ethics, security, privacy and safety within technical curricula. The proposed responsibility was not reserved for people called ethicists; it extended to the education of those studying and developing the technology. [ai-release][ai-report]

Recommendation 18 addressed schools and universities teaching AI, machine learning, computer science and data science. It asked that ethical and related concerns become integral to those subjects. Our reading is that responsibility should be learned alongside technical methods, rather than treated as a separate assurance offered after a system is built. The recommendation itself does not show that institutions revised their courses. [ai-report]

The report also assigned work beyond the classroom. Recommendation 19 urged AI specialists, safety specialists and their professional societies to collaborate in developing AI safety engineering. That proposal connected responsibility with a field of practice. It called for cooperation between professions rather than suggesting that a statement of good intentions could establish a system’s safety. [ai-report]

For educators and practitioners, the practical question is how that preparation would connect with decisions affecting people. Recommendation 16 separately urged evidence-based checks of effectiveness and fairness when federal agencies use AI for consequential individual decisions. These proposals offer a basis for shared ethical discussion without prescribing a religious position. They are not evidence of safer outcomes: the announcement and report belong to the same government initiative, and neither confirms implementation of these recommendations. [ai-release][ai-report]

Source documents

  1. The Administration’s Report on the Future of Artificial Intelligencehttps://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/10/12/administrations-report-future-artificial-intelligence
  2. Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligencehttps://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whitehouse_files/microsites/ostp/NSTC/preparing_for_the_future_of_ai.pdf