This is an open letter to the Office of the UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology, who are attempting to move into the space of AI governance and have put out a call for papers.
Update April 2024: see also my newer blogpost, AI Is Not a Unitary Actor: My Response to the UN Interim Report Consultation.
Dear Colleagues,
This is a brief summary of my thinking and writings on the topic of global AI governance.
Terms and framing
- I will take regulation to mean any means by which a complex entity perpetuates a recognisable version of itself into the future. For example, breathing regulates oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in our bodies, tax policies not only generate revenue but can help regulate economies.
- Governing is deliberate, explicit regulation. Government is just one means by which we regulate our societies and nations, though it can be a very useful one.
Is the entire globe the right level for any governance or regulation of AI?
My own vision concerning global regulation and governance of AI
My papers on AI Governance
- AI is a technology, so much more like nuclear power/weapons, than the climate. This is because for any technology, its outputs and impacts are much more subject to regulatory context than nature is.
- The US is presently resistant to, even interfering with, global cooperation on AI governance. But in the past it has overcome similar internal national resistance in other sectors to facilitate very good orders, benefiting itself and most (perhaps all) others.
This chapter provides an overview of the nature and implications of artificial intelligence (AI), with particular attention to how they impinge on possible applications to and of law. Any artifact that transforms perception to more relevant information, including action, is AI. There is no question that AI, and digital technologies in general, are introducing massive transformations to society. Nevertheless, these impacts should be governable by less transformative legislative change. Indeed, the vast majority of AI—particularly where it has social impact—is and will remain a consequence of corporate commercial processes, and as such subject to existing regulations and regulating strategies. However, it is critical to remember that what is being held accountable is not machines themselves but the people who build, own, or operate them—including any who alter their operation through assault on their cybersecurity. It is thus important to govern the human application of technology—the human processes of development, testing, operation, and monitoring.
Most of my work on governance has been focussed on bettering EU policy, which is of course in many ways world-leading. Here is another invited handbook chapter–here, the Handbook of AI Governance (!) and here coauthored with Mark Dempsey, Keegan McBride, Meeri Haataja (May 2022) Transnational Digital Governance and Its Impact on Artificial Intelligence (again, a green open access URL and I attach the final PDF) Precis:
The rapid pace of technological advancement and innovation has put existing governance and regulatory mechanisms to the test. There is a clear need for new and innovative regulatory mechanisms that enable governments to successfully manage the integration of digital technologies into our societies, and to ensure that such integration occurs in a sustainable, beneficial, and just manner. Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands out as one of the most debated of such innovations. What exactly is it, how should it be built and deployed, how can it be used, and how should it be regulated? Yet across the period of this debate, AI is becoming widely used and addressed within existing, evolving, and bespoke regulatory contexts. The present chapter explores the extant governance of AI and, in particular, what is arguably the most successful AI regulatory approach to date, that of the European Union. The chapter explores core definitional concepts, shared understandings, values, and approaches currently in play. It argues that not only are the Union’s regulations locally effective, but, due to the so-called “Brussels effect,” regulatory initiatives within the European Union also have a much broader global impact. As such, they warrant close consideration.
Returning briefly to the truly global, though initially done with respect to whether the EU even should be regulating AI, I wrote an article exploring the capacities of not only the EU, US, and China to build AI, but the entire rest of the world as well. We found the EU and China to be surprisingly comparable, and the rest of the world outside these three regions to be stronger than many realise. Is There an AI Cold War? (with Helena Malikova, 2021) In addition to this data, we also present qualitative, narrative evidence of attempts at regulatory interference we have witnessed. (I have a follow-up article in progress looking at more years of data: exact leadership is volatile, but the policy-relevant analytic outcomes are consistent with this published paper.)
Regulation is a means societies use to create the stability, public goods, and infrastructure they need to thrive securely. This policy brief is intended to both document and to address claims of a new AI cold war: a binary competition between the United States and China that is too important for other powers to either ignore or truly participate in directly, beyond taking sides. We argue that while some of the claims of this narrative are based at least in part on genuine security concerns and important unknowns, evidence for its extreme binary nature is lacking. This absence of factual evidence is concerning, because related geopolitical tensions may be used to interfere with regulation of AI and agencies associated with its development. Here we first document and then analyze the extremely bipolar picture prominent policymakers and political commentators have been recently painting of the AI technological situation, portraying China and the United States as the only two global powers. We then examine the plausibility of these claims using two measures: internationally registered AI patents and the market capitalization of the companies that hold them. These two measures, while each somewhat arbitrary and imperfect, are often deployed in the context of the binary narrative and can therefore be seen as conservative choices in that they should favor exactly the “champions” of that narrative. In fact, these measures do not produce bipolar results: Chinese capacity has been exaggerated and that of other global regions deprecated. These findings call into question the motivation behind the documented claims, though they also further illuminate the uncertainty concerning digital technology security. We recommend that all parties engage in contributing to a safe, secure, and transparent regulatory landscape.
With Meeri Haataja, I have also written a series of three articles seeking to immediately inform and improve the EU's AI Act. (These are intended to be combined into one, but not soon enough that I can share that now.)
- Reflections on the EU’s AI Act and How We Could Make It Even Better (pdf, March 2022)
- What Costs Should We Expect From the EU’s AI Act? (2021, really written at the same time as the previously-linked article, it was supposed to be an appendix but the publisher balked at the length.)
- The European Parliament’s AI Regulation: Should We Call It Progress? (pdf, Spring 2023)
- see the label "regulation" on Adventures in NI.
- you might in particular be interested in A smart bureaucrat's guide to AI regulation (2019)
- Europe Is in Danger of Using the Wrong Definition of AI (March 2022)
- One Day, AI Will Seem as Human as Anyone. What Then? (June 2022)
Joanna Bryson
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