Professor Professor Gillian Hadfield is director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, University of Toronto, and author of Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, raises her ideas about creating AI Regulation.
“When even the companies developing AI themselves agree with the need for regulation, it is time to stop discussing abstract principles and get down to the business of how to regulate a rapidly advancing technology landscape.
It is clear that our regulatory system needs an update. If we try to regulate 21st century technology and beyond with 20th century tools, we’ll get none of the benefits of regulation and all of the downsides.
So, if we need to reinvent the rules to keep pace with the technological change advanced by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, where do we start?
Google’s Sundar Pichai is right that technology companies cannot simply build AI and leave it to the will of the market.
But what we can do is try to use the best traits of markets — competition, transparency, rapid iteration — to reform our regulatory system. Specifically, this means pairing strong government oversight with private sector “regulatory markets.”
We are already seeing governments essentially outsource their roles as regulators, leaving matters to self-regulation on an increasing scale. European governments, for example, after creating the right to be forgotten on search engines that pre-dated GDPR, left the task of enforcing this right to search engines themselves. The reason? Governments lacked the technological competence, resources, and political coherence to do so themselves.
A regulatory market is a new solution to the problem of the limited capacity of traditional regulatory agencies, invented for the nation-state manufacturing age, to keep up with the global digital age.
It combines the incentives that markets create to invent more effective and less burdensome ways to provide a service with hard government oversight to ensure that whatever the regulatory market produces, it satisfies the goals and targets set by democratic governments.
So, instead of governments writing detailed rules, governments instead set the goals: What accident rates are acceptable in self-driving cars? What amount of leakage from a confidential data set is too much? What factors must be excluded from an algorithmic decision?
Then, instead of tech companies deciding for themselves how they will meet those goals, the job is taken on by independent companies that move into the regulatory space, incentivized to invent streamlined ways to achieve government-set goals.”
The original article can be found here.
AIWS Innovation Network Roundtable on United Nations 2045, started on 02/02/2020, and the first session will discuss this issue on 02/20/2020. Governor Michael Dukakis, co-founder of AIWS Innovation Network, will be the moderator of the roundtable.
