When Did We Abandon The Rule of Law?
We are steamrolling centuries of learning in the pursuit of new
The World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting is underway in Davos, Switzerland and that means a flood of announcements. You must be a true Davos junkie to keep up with the news and you must have a powerful eye to catch what really interests you in the mountain of text. I caught this one in today’s sheaf:
The Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution model is to bring together business leaders, governments, start-ups, civil society, academia and international organizations to co-design and pilot innovative approaches to governance for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain. Affiliate Centers will follow this multistakeholder approach.
“We want to ensure that a technologically enriched future is safe, ethical, inclusive and sustainable for all, not just a few,” said Murat Sonmez, Head of the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. “The Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an accelerator for impact and having a global network of Centers will enable us to move faster than ever.”
The key phrase is “innovative approaches to governance for emerging technologies…” This is the fashionable statement that many non-profits and a few governments are using to address the need for AI to be “beneficial” to humans (per Stuart Russell).
Unless I missed something and we abandoned the rule of law, we have a system for governance. It may be imperfect, it may have gaps and overlaps. It may even — may I be so bold as to say it — reflect that it was built by humans and, therefore, has embedded flaws, biases, contradictions, and ambiguities. But, there it is. Part of it is codified, but a substantial portion has been left un-codified, allowing it to develop through stages. I have yet to hear why AI should be exempt from our system.
So, when Murat Sonmez (newly installed as the Chief Business Officer of the WEF), suggests we need “innovative approaches” we should ask why? What is it about AI that suggests we need to abandon our existing system and invent something new? The answer is that we are fearful we cannot limit the scope of what we create. AI the agent will simply become AI the principle and do as it wishes. We are creating a force which some believe will be more powerful than any human or even collection of humans, and we recognize that force can, in an instant, overpower its creator.
AI may require innovative software to contain it. It may require innovative techniques outside software. But, none of that suggests that we should abandon our value systems and build an innovative new one for AI. And if we did, what of humans? Why should we live under this innovative system, when we have a system of our own?
We do need leadership at this juncture. The questions raised are serious and they deserve our attention. But, we also need to appreciate our history as we attempt to solve the problems we are creating. Humans have created fearful technologies and have managed to contain them because such technologies were always limited by a human in the loop. Our next obvious step towards disaster is to remove the human in the loop. We have not done so yet, and therefore in many ways taking that last step is still something within our control.
What a perfect moment, then, to evaluate how we can use what we have to accomplish our new purpose. If we re-vitalize our codified values, making them useable by human and machine, where would that take us? If we added to that the customs, etc., that are not codified, but we use every day, what would that look like? What does it even mean to say the agent must obey the laws of the principle, in the context of AI? Finally, note that Sonmez’ list did not include lawyers. They seldom do. Why is that?
