#A bumpy road poster how to#

It is too far-reaching a tool to be governed on a nation-by-nation basis. After all, it is overwhelmingly likely that the Global South will shoulder the brunt of the downsides that come with the age of AI, from the exploitative labeling jobs needed to train LLMs to extractive data mining practices.Ī global settlement on AI ethics principles has clear advantages for all, since the effects of a transformational general-use technology will bleed across national and geographical boundaries. More complex still, any global settlement on AI regulation that genuinely aspires to mitigate the negative consequences of this new technology must account for perspectives from regions often underrepresented in global discussions, including Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. and the EU on strategic aims regarding AI regulation, the former prioritizing innovation and the latter risk minimization. Though an ideological ally of the U.S., there are significant ideological differences between the U.S. Europe is likely to play a decisive role in shaping discussions. around a table together is just the largest of many hurdles to a global agreement. Getting policymakers from China and the U.S. It seems possible that rivalry and suspicion between two great powers and their allies could derail any attempt at consensus.

Some gained traction but none have created anything like an enforceable global settlement. So far, a range of public bodies, civil society organizations and industry groups have come forward with regulatory frameworks that they hope the whole world might agree on. Today, it is becoming institutionalized and borne out in policy in both countries, even as there has been growing recognition among researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers and the wider public that this unpredictable, fast-growing and multiuse set of technologies needs to be regulated - and that any effective attempt to do so would necessarily be global in scope. The narrative of a U.S.-China “AI arms race” sounded jingoistic and paranoid just a few years ago. “There is reason to be optimistic,” according to the authors, since “misunderstandings between cultures and regions play a more important role in undermining cross-cultural trust, relative to fundamental disagreements, than is often supposed.” The paper, also published in Chinese, takes the unconventional stance that many of these barriers may be shallower than they appear.

#A bumpy road poster how to#

Coming to a global agreement on how to regulate AI, the paper argues, is not just urgently necessary, but notably achievable.Ĭommentaries on the barriers to global collaboration on AI governance often foreground tensions and follow the assumption that “Eastern” and “Western” philosophical traditions are fundamentally in conflict. Just about two and a half years ago, artificial intelligence researchers from Peking University in Beijing, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and the University of Cambridge released a fairly remarkable paper about cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics that received surprisingly little attention beyond the insular world of academics who follow such things. She studied art history at Cambridge University.

Miranda Gabbott is a writer based in Barcelona.