In society today, people experiencing disability can face discrimination. As artificial intelligence solutions take on increasingly important roles in decision-making and interaction, they have the potential to impact fair treatment of people with disabilities in society both positively and negatively. We describe some of the opportunities and risks across four emerging AI application areas: employment, education, public safety, and healthcare, identified in a workshop with participants experiencing a range of disabilities. In many existing situations, non-AI solutions are already discriminatory, and introducing AI runs the risk of simply perpetuating and replicating these flaws. We next discuss strategies for supporting fairness in the context of disability throughout the AI development lifecycle. AI systems should be reviewed for potential impact on the user in their broader context of use. They should offer opportunities to redress errors, and for users and those impacted to raise fairness concerns. People with disabilities should be included when sourcing data to build models, and in testing, to create a more inclusive and robust system. Finally, we offer pointers into an established body of literature on human-centered design processes and philosophies that may assist AI and ML engineers in innovating algorithms that reduce harm and ultimately enhance the lives of people with disabilities.
In this commentary the author poses the question: can the "curb-cut" phenomenon (a phenomenon holding that innovations motivated by a desire to address the challenges faced by persons with disabilities benefit the broader majority) be scaled to help address our society's greatest global challenges? The article describes an international initiative that leverages the World Wide Web to address the economic exclusion of people with disabilities and maps out how this may help to address the broader issues of our current markets, education, employment, and financial systems.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.