Thank you. That's an excellent question.
My first reaction would be that this goes back to an important need for this bill to really be able to allow for regulations that will address discriminatory bias outputs that come from AI systems. If the bill is structured in a way that the obligation is clear and actually captures the range of ways in which algorithmic bias can arise, then companies will have an impetus to hire teams that are better enabled to anticipate and mitigate some of those harms.
One of the comments that I included in my introduction was that one of the issues, and what I see as one of the limits of this bill as it's structured right now, is that many occasions of discriminatory bias have been identified after the fact, usually through investigative reporting, usually by experts or people who experience these harms themselves and so have an understanding of the kind of harm that might arise. Then when that becomes publicly known and there's a public backlash, at that point there's an explanation that it was unforeseeable at the time the system was being developed or that the initial idea was developed to automate a decision-making process that was previously done by people, for example.
This bill, in the structure it is in right now, needs to be enabled to capture not just discrimination on recognized grounds but also discrimination by proxy for a recognized ground. Where a postal code might stand in or where employment status or previous experience of imprisonment or social networks might stand in to influence algorithmic decision-making and reflect a protected ground, this bill needs to really capture all the complexity of how these harms can arise so that companies are then motivated to ensure, to the best of their abilities, that this kind of discrimination doesn't happen.
This is also why we recommended an equity audit, which obviously would need more structure probably in regulation to really signal and advance the importance of equity and anti-discrimination in the development of these systems.
It's a crucially important point. I honestly do think that the companion document reflects the importance of that, but we don't see it fleshed out in the bill right now.