Monkey see, monkey do
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Senator James maroney WAtches how it’s done
The Balkanization of the United States continues.
A Democratic lawmaker who is among the nation's biggest legislative proponents of regulating artificial intelligence is hopeful to see legislation pass this year to protect residents from potentially discriminatory and harmful uses of algorithms.
State Sen. James Maroney, D-Milford, introduced legislation last year to regulate artificial intelligence that ultimately died when Gov. Ned Lamont signaled his dissentover concerns that Connecticut would legislate the issue differently than other states as the issue becomes more salient nationally.
Maroney said he believes this year can be different though after leading a consortium with representatives from 47 state legislatures last year.
“I think we’re in a different place from last year; the governor didn’t want to be the first or the tip of the spear,” he said.
Last June, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a comprehensive artificial intelligence regulation bill. Maroney said other states have adopted bills with smaller pieces of the Colorado bill and the bill proposed in Connecticut.
"I'm in close touch with Sen. (Robert) Rodriguez who passed this bill in Colorado and keeping abreast of what's going on with Colorado so we can make changes with our bill here," he said. "But our goal is to stay as close as possible to the Colorado bill."
DISKWINATION! It’s all about Diskwinimation
According to an overview of the Colorado bill that Maroney seeks to emulate, the law requires algorithm developers to disclose information demonstrating they took reasonable care to protect from discrimination. This can include providing a statement about the information used to train the model and a risk management policy, as well as making consumers aware they are interacting with an artificial intelligence model.
Maroney said one challenge of artificial intelligence algorithms is when they are deployed for things, such as approving housing and hiring, since they are only as good as the models they're trained on, which may include discriminatory biases.
“We have been doing our best in the absence of federal legislation, which I think is highly unlikely, to work across the states,” he said. "I think we will see a similar number of bills in other states."
AN ACT CONCERNING CONSUMER PROTECTIONS IN INTERACTIONS WITH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS.
(I drafted a lengthy summary of all 26 pages of the document, but then conceded to myself that only a law junkie would want to plow through it all, so I’ve just left the link, and you can dip into it or — almost certainly — not. Suffice to say that it places an incredibly onerous, time-consuming burden of AI developers and the companies that use their programs to draw up and submit to the state bureaucrats a detailed plan of how they are ensuring that the devloprs’ algorithms only discriminate against white, able-bodied males.)
Like this:
DEFINITIONS:
(1) (a) "ALGORITHMIC DISCRIMINATION" MEANS ANY CONDITION IN
WHICH THE USE OF AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM RESULTS IN AN
UNLAWFUL DIFFERENTIAL TREATMENT OR IMPACT THAT DISFAVORS AN
INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP OF INDIVIDUALS ON THE BASIS OF THEIR ACTUAL OR
PERCEIVED AGE, COLOR, DISABILITY, ETHNICITY, GENETIC INFORMATION,
LIMITED PROFICIENCY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, NATIONAL ORIGIN, RACE,
RELIGION, REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH, SEX, VETERAN STATUS, OR OTHER
CLASSIFICATION PROTECTED UNDER THE LAWS OF THIS STATE OR FEDERAL
LAW.
No mention in Colorado’s law is made of how many new DEI graduates will have to be added to the state payroll to monitor and review all these new reports, and our own Senator Maroney is mum on the issue himself but I’ve never met a Democrat politician who considered expanding the unionized government labor force a bad thing, so I doubt they’ve even considered the matter, nor will they.
