Children and Artificial Intelligence
New guidelines from UNICEF and BAAI
On the 16th of September new guidelines to help governments and companies develop AI policies considering children needs were released. This was the result of a collaboration between Steve Vosloo and UNICEF.
It is possible to access information from their different workshops directly on their site:
Automatic decision-making and frameworks constructed in code are on a direct and aggregated level making a difference in the lives of children around the world connected to digital devices or environments. It can. record their voice, influence speech and work through recommendations. At the same time more children are now at an earlier age being introduced to technology.
In an article in MIT Technology Review by Karen Hao one of the key figures in the development of the report, Steve Vosloo – a policy specialist for digital connectivity at Unicef, the United Nations Children Fund, was quoted to say:
“Because they are developing intellectually and emotionally and physically, they are very shapeable.”
The guidelines are meant to address themes that are already being discussed and tailor these to children.
According to the same article Karen Hao argues that there are not only negative, but also possibilities for children, writing:
“Emotional AI assistants, though relatively nascent, could provide mental-health support and have been demonstrated to improve the social skills of autistic children. Face recognition, used with careful limitations, could help identify children who’ve been kidnapped or trafficked.”
In addition to this there is the argument of educating kids about AI.
“The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), an organization backed by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology and the Beijing municipal government, released a set of AI principles for children too. The announcement follows a year after BAAI released the Beijing AI principles, understood to be the guiding values for China’s national AI development.
AI applications are already being rolled out in many countries.
Therefore, it makes sense to begin implementing these guidelines and to think about how children use technology in conjunction with limitations that may have to be placed on certain companies or digital environments.
This is #500daysofAI and you are reading article 488. I am writing one new article about or related to artificial intelligence every day for 500 days.
