Examples of Automated Systems

The below examples are meant to illustrate the breadth of automated systems that, insofar as they have the potential to meaningfully impact rights, opportunities, or access to critical resources or services, should be covered by the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. These examples should not be construed to limit that scope, which includes automated systems that may not yet exist, but which fall under these criteria.

Examples of automated systems for which the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights should be considered include those that have the potential to meaningfully impact:

• Civil rights, civil liberties, or privacy, including but not limited to:
  • Speech-related systems such as automated content moderation tools;
  • Surveillance and criminal justice system algorithms such as risk assessments, predictive policing, automated license plate readers, real-time facial recognition systems (especially those used in public places or during protected activities like peaceful protests), social media monitoring, and ankle monitoring devices;
  • Voting-related systems such as signature matching tools;
  • Systems with a potential privacy impact such as smart home systems and associated data, systems that use or collect health-related data, systems that use or collect education-related data, criminal justice system data, ad-targeting systems, and systems that perform big data analytics in order to build profiles or infer personal information about individuals; and
  • Any system that has the meaningful potential to lead to algorithmic discrimination.
• Equal opportunities, including but not limited to:
  • Education-related systems such as algorithms that purport to detect student cheating or plagiarism, admissions algorithms, online or virtual reality student monitoring systems, projections of student progress or outcomes, algorithms that determine access to resources or programs, and surveillance of classes (whether online or in-person);
  • Housing-related systems such as tenant screening algorithms, automated valuation systems that estimate the value of homes used in mortgage underwriting or home insurance, and automated valuations from online aggregator websites; and
  • Employment-related systems such as workplace algorithms that inform all aspects of the terms and conditions of employment including, but not limited to, pay or promotion, hiring or termination algorithms, virtual or augmented reality workplace training programs, and electronic workplace surveillance and management systems.
• Access to critical resources and services, including but not limited to:
  • Health and health insurance technologies such as medical AI systems and devices, AI-assisted diagnostic tools, algorithms or predictive models used to support clinical decision making, medical or insurance health risk assessments, drug addiction risk assessments and associated access algorithms, wearable technologies, wellness apps, insurance care allocation algorithms, and health insurance cost and underwriting algorithms;
  • Financial system algorithms such as loan allocation algorithms, financial system access determination algorithms, credit scoring systems, insurance algorithms including risk assessments, automated interest rate determinations, and financial algorithms that apply penalties (e.g., that can garnish wages or withhold tax returns);
  • Systems that impact the safety of communities such as automated traffic control systems, electrical grid controls, smart city technologies, and industrial emissions and environmental impact control algorithms; and
  • Systems related to access to benefits or services or assignment of penalties such as systems that support decision-makers who adjudicate benefits such as collating or analyzing information or matching records, systems which similarly assist in the adjudication of administrative or criminal penalties, fraud detection algorithms, services or benefits access control algorithms, biometric systems used as access control, and systems which make benefits or services related decisions on a fully or partially autonomous basis (such as a determination to revoke benefits).