The U.S. intelligence community released artificial intelligence principles and an ethics framework on Thursday to ensure that intel organizations are safely and legally developing AI systems as the technology quickly evolves. The long-awaited principles and framework, released in two separate documents by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, are meant to outline the intelligence community's broad values and guidance for the ethical development of AI. The accompanying six-page framework, with 10 stated objectives, is meant to put "meat on the bones" of the stated principles, Ben Huebner, chief of ODNI's Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy, and Transparency, said Thursday on a call with reporters. Huebner said there are a series of questions that practitioners within the 17 intelligence agencies should consider when developing AI. It's a tool, and it's a tool that provides the intelligence community with a consistent approach" to artificial intelligence, Huebner said. The intelligence community is a massive conglomerate of agencies, each tasked with a specific intelligence mission, making it difficult to verify the implementation of these ethics considerations. To ease oversight challenges, a critical piece of the framework calls on AI users in the intel community to adequately document information about the AI technology under development. That would include explanations on the AI's intended use, its design, its limitations, related data sets and changes to its algorithm over time. Asked how ODNI will verify that AI projects at intelligence agencies under its purview are following the framework and principles, Huebner pointed to the documentation guidance that could then be accessible by legal counsels, inspectors general, and privacy and civil liberties officers. By giving us your email, you are opting in to the C4ISRNET Daily Brief. "One of the things I think you see throughout particularly the ethics framework is the incorporation of best practices to allow the folks [in] the oversight community ... the tools they'll need to conduct that oversight," Huebner said. The framework is just the first iteration of ODNI's ethics framework. Huebner told reporters to expect further iterations of the framework as the intel community learns more about the use cases for AI, and as the technology itself matures. Dean Souleles, who runs ODNI's Augmenting Intelligence through Machines Innovation Hub, told reporters that within ODNI's working groups, they are "actively" developing different standards for future use cases. "It is too early to define a long list of dos and don'ts," Souleles said. "We need to understand how this technology works.

Building off the Defense Department's recent adoption of five artificial intelligence principles, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will soon release its own public set of AI principles. Ben Huebner, the chief of ODNI's Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Office, gave a preview of that upcoming strategy Wednesday at an Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) conference. "None of them will be surprises," Huebner said. "We have been very integrated with the work of the [DoD Joint AI Center] and others, and fundamentally, there's a lot of consensus here." Aside from DoD, other corners of the federal government have begun to roll out their own AI ethics platforms.

As the Central Intelligence Agency harnesses machine learning and artificial intelligence to better meet its mission, insiders are aggressively addressing issues around bias and ethics intrinsic to the emerging tech. "We at the agency have over 100 AI initiatives that we are working on and that's going to continue to be the case," Benjamin Huebner, the CIA's privacy and civil liberties officer said Friday at an event hosted by the Brookings Institution in Washington. "That's a big complicated issue that we are very much thinking about all the time." Huebner said collaborating with the intelligence agency's data scientists is one of his favorite parts of his job. His privacy team works directly with their tech-facing colleagues on projects around statistics, coding, and graphical representations.

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim. But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.