Artificial Intelligence and governance

We define artificial intelligence’s governance as the model of relationships among the businesses, governments and scientific communities involved in the progress and development of this technology.

The governance challenges of any technology, particularly artificial intelligence, are related to the uncertainty arising from the trade-off between its potential opportunities and associated risks.

AI´s Governance

1. Artificial Intelligence is a General-Purpose Technology (GPT). This type of technology transforms the key functions of civilization, from energy production to interpersonal communication. GPTs come with the speedy extension of their functions throughout society; their economic potential is exciting, but it is complicated to have either centralized control or centralized governance objectives.

2. Artificial intelligence is currently trapped in an environment of strategic competition. Both governments and large, global companies are investing plenty of resources in its development. Seven out of the ten largest corporations in the world by market value are companies that place artificial intelligence at their very core (Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook, Alibaba and Tencent) and they invest large sums of money in R+D, making centralized governance hard to achieve. 

That is the reason behind the creation of Partnership on AI, a consortium where all of these companies (except for Tencent) have joined forces to debate how to promote and regulate innovation and governance in artificial intelligence and, at the same time, fight its potential manipulation.

3. The privatization of artificial intelligence’s governance. Our experts warn about the risk that the private sector will catch the public’s eye and that regulations are built with no transparency, accountability and democratic human governance. There is a risk that technology empires are the ones making the decisions on the technology that affects all of us. 

4. The “Rule of Technology”. In his essay Manufacturing An Artificial Intelligence Revolution, biologist Yarden Katz talks about the false impression that current systems have exceeded human capabilities to the point that we think machines can handle many areas in a better way. These statements are based on a narrow and radically empirical view of human intelligence, and it is what Alain Supoit dubbed “governance by numbers”, a way to limit thinking based on metrics.

Our expert David Weinberger states that artificial intelligence is based on machine learning that learns from the data we feed it, which often reflects existing prejudices and biases as well as human subjectivity. We use these systems because we believe their results are better than those humans could generate, but sometimes that superiority is just a matter of greater speed and lower price.