AI governance can't be left to the vested interests
A final report by the UN's high level advisory body on artificial intelligence makes for, at times, a surreal read. Named ‘Governing AI for Humanity’,
A final report by the UN’s high level advisory body on artificial intelligence makes for, at times, a surreal read. Named ‘Governing AI for Humanity’, the document underlines the contradictory challenges of making any kind of governance stick on such a fast developing, massively invested and heavily hyped technology.
On the one hand, the report observes — quite correctly — that there’s “a global governance deficit with respect to AI.” On the other, the UN advisory body dryly points out that: “Hundreds of [AI] guides, frameworks and principles have been adopted by governments, companies and consortiums, and regional and international organizations.” Even as this report adds plus-one-more set of recommendations to the AI governance pile.
The overarching problem the report is highlighting is there’s a patchwork of approaches building up around governing AI, rather than any collective coherence on what to do about a technology that’s both powerful and stupid.
AI automation can certainly be powerful: press the button and you get outputs scaled on demand. But AI can also be stupid because, despite what the name implies, AI is not intelligence; its outputs are a reflection of its inputs; and bad inputs can lead to very bad (and unintelligent) outcomes.
Add scale to stupidity and AI can cause very big problems indeed, as the report highlights. For instance, it can amplify discrimination or spread disinformation. Both of which are already happening, in all sorts of domains, at problematic scale, which leads to very real world harms.
But those with commercial irons in the generative AI fire that’s been raging over the past few years are so in thrall to the potential scale upside of this technology that they’re doing everything they can to downplay the risks of AI stupidity.
In recent years, this has included heavy lobbying about the idea that the world needs rules to protect against so-called AGI (artificial general intelligence), or the concept of an AI that can think for itself and could even out-think humans. But this is a flashy fiction intended to grab policymakers’ attention and focus lawmakers’ minds on non existent AI problems, thereby normalizing the harmful stupidities of current gen AI tools. (So really, the PR game being played is about defining and defusing the notion of concept of “AI Safety” by making it mean let’s just worry about science fiction.)
A narrow definition of AI safety serves to distract from the vast environmental harms of pouring ever more compute power, energy and water into building data centers big enough to feed this voracious new beast of scale. Debates about whether we can afford to keep scaling AI like this are not happening at any high level — but maybe they should be?
The ushered in spector of AGI also serves to direct the conversation to skip over the myriad legal and ethical issues chain-linked to the development and use of automation tools trained on other people’s information without their permission. Jobs and livelihoods are at stake. Even whole industries. And so are individual people’s rights and freedoms.
Words like ‘copyright’ and ‘privacy’ scare AI developers far more than the claimed existential risks of AGI because these are clever people who haven’t actually lost touch with reality.
But those with a vested interest in scaling AI choose to harp only about the potential upside of their innovations in order to minimize the application of any “guardrails” (to use the minimalist metaphor of choice when technologists are finally forced to apply limits to their tech) standing in the way of achieving greater profits.
Toss in geopolitical rivalries and a bleak global economic picture and nation states’ governments can often be all too willing to join the AI hype and fray, pushing for less governance in the hopes it might help them scale their own national AI champions.
With such a skewed backdrop, is it any wonder AI governance remains such a horribly confusing and tangled mess? Even in the European Union where, earlier this year, lawmakers did actually adopt a risk-based framework for regulating a minority of applications of AI, the loudest voices discussing this landmark effort are still decrying its existence and claiming the law spells dooms for the bloc’s chances of homegrown innovation. And they’re doing that even after the law got watered down after earlier tech industry lobbying (led by France, with its eye on the interests of Mistral, its hope for a national GenAI champion).