I often refer to the wisdom from the American Bard, Mark Twain, in one of his opuses that one’s technology is another’s magic.
A board dinner for my undergraduate College of Liberal Arts that my new guide dog and I recently attended intently explored the intersecting role and value of liberal arts (the pillar of Western civilization) with science and technology.
There seems to be a trend, with undergraduate education, that high-impact jobs are felt to be those in STEM.
During my formal education and during my career, evolving technologies have impacted me as a blind person and as a legal professional. Hence, I will co-lead various panels this spring exploring the impact of artificial intelligence, the latest of the emerging technologies, on the lives of legal professionals with disabilities.
Yet it is the law, an outgrowth of the liberal arts, and its values or moral rigors that humanizes these developments for me as a blind person.
A great poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, wrote the 1892 poem “Ulysses.” A sentence reflecting the experience of a lawyer and blind person with a new guide dog navigating bias as well as these technological developments that could alleviate or worsen said bias provides:
“All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea.”
During our combined inclusion and technological revolutions, science and technology must inform our civil, moral, and political universe. Ethics, morals and metaphysics must infuse science and technology with humane understanding.
The next decade or more will be ones of continued scientific and technological innovation reshaping what it means to be an American with or without a disability. Here qualitatively, the liberal arts, in other words the law, has a drastic role to play in providing guardrails as humans continuously advance as a species.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, as amended, has been this landmark set of legal aspirations and panoply that has shaped American culture resulting in more inclusion. Yet blind people remain highly unemployed or under-employed, showing the faults with legal solutions alone. Arguably, the law can build the floor, but does not necessarily establish some kind of inclusive Utopia.
Emerging technologies or even the old technologies finally made to be accessible could either fortify the benefit of the numerator for inclusion or degrade the denominator if technologies are not designed to be inclusive, are not legally compliant, and, importantly, are not implemented and overseen by disabled leaders.
The U.S. Department of Justice has only recently updated what is called Title II (state and local government) requirements of the ADA to ensure that websites and mobile applications are accessible. But first, a dose of realism would be helpful as to artificial intelligence.
As a federal executive, I attended a mini-fellowship at the Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Lab on artificial intelligence. In the first, artificial intelligence has existed far before our recent public awareness. In some cases, this has benefited and continually benefits people with disabilities. Alexa is one example.
In the second, it is difficult to argue AI will abrogate the civil rights of minority groups, when the old rights and old technologies remain noninclusive.
To this end, websites and mobile applications often remain inaccessible for those with sensory-based disabilities, e.g., by those who have a visual impairment. I recently attended a meeting where someone had never heard the term “alt text.”
I must, however, briefly note my fourth guide dog could have her own worries as to AI. I have observed “posts” in the technology and guide dog accessibility forums discussing AI bot dogs as a replacement to dog partners. Doubt that this will occur at any point soon. Indeed, the dystopian Terminator films of course inculcates that dogs remain our best friends, when the AI beings come for us!
I may be no inventor of the internet. That said, I am sure that blind people have used the internet for some amount of time and should have been long guaranteed a digital public square free from segregation. That said, the final rule issued by the U.S. Department of Justice requires that state and local government websites and mobile apps comply with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (“WCAG”) 2.1. Government entities must comply with the final rule within two to three years, depending on population size. Web and mobile app content created by third parties for state and local government entities must also be compliant with requirements set forth in the final rule.
In this way, this final rule, even though it does not cover places of public accommodations, could have “downstream effects” for more than the covered entities set forth in the regulatory text. This final rule arguably shows the challenges in finding concurrent congruity among technological developments and civil rights legal panoply that ensure they are inclusive for people with disabilities.
In conclusion, I owe my career, hard-won, to the blind lawyers who have battled before me and on whose shoulders I stand. So, I must ensure that evolving technologies advance our civil and human rights, and do not degrade these to future citizens. A liberal arts education and my old history honors society demand I work towards this goal.
Gary C. Norman, Esq., LL.M., is a past chair of the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. He can be reached at (410) 241-6745.