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Addressing the complex issues surrounding AI at work can be challenging. It touches on personal experiences, professional roles, and charged political views on Big Tech. It often involves vague or technical terminology. It’s a topic that many employers will see as their ‘management prerogative’ and out of scope for collective bargaining or even worker consultation.
Alongside the Generative AI for Education summit in London yesterday, the DfE updated their ‘Product Safety Expectations’ for EdTech developers, and for schools to consider when deciding which tools are safe to use.
Many of the updates reflect discussions from the GenAI in Education: Have Your Say process - offering a powerful mandate from students for these expectations. Check out what students had to say in the video here https://connectedbydata.org/ai-in-education/ or the full report.
“I want to offer another vision of human compatibility in AI: one that embraces a thick and demanding world of human capacity, social complexity, and local politics in place of the thin, pliable, universalizing world of individual preferences.”
Jacob G. Foster; From Thin to Thick: Toward a Politics of Human-Compatible AI. Public Culture 1 September 2023; 35 (3 (101)): 417–430. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-10742593
The distinction between “thick” and “thin” modes of involving communities around (data and) AI is useful. “Thin” involvement skims off surface-level instincts and data from frictionless transactions, while “thick” involvement demands thoughtful, complex, nuanced and stretching engagement. In reality we need both.
We’ve been creating a small toolkit to help schools, colleges and informal education settings to discuss Generative AI in Education. This blog post reflects on elements of the development process.
As part of the launch for the Principles on Public Participation in the Procurement of AI this week we ran a play test of an adapted version of the Good Governance Game.
As the the Open Government Community, Connected by Data amongst them, meet in Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain this week, they will reaffirm a commitment to the Open Government Declaration, with it’s central focus on supporting civic participation. In the new Vitoria-Gasteiz Declaration they will also highlight the need to link open government with broader global agendas, including the governance of “artificial intelligence, data, and emerging technologies”, providing renewed backing for the idea that “public participation in civic life” must extend to the public decisions about data and digital.
In July we coordinated an open letter to Keir Starmer PM, Peter Kyle MP (the then Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology) and Bridget Phillipson MP (then Secretary of State for Education) calling for investment in AI Literacy for All.
We received a brief e-mail reply from the Department for Education and, on August 28th, a reply from Feryal Clark MP, the then Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology which is quoted below:
The principles for Public Participation in AI Procurement we will be co-launching alongside the Open Government Partnership Summit in a few weeks time focus on the what and the how of involving affected communities in decisions at all stages of buying and managing AI systems in the public sector. But ahead of that, we need to answer the question why? Why is is particularly important to involve publics in AI procurement, when, to date, procurement has often not been a space where public engagement is widespread.
Preparing for our workshop at the Open Gov Hub today, I’ve jotted down the following reasons.
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