Abstract Judicial and carceral systems increasingly use criminal risk assessment algorithms to make decisions that affect individual freedoms. While the accuracy, fairness, and legality of these algorithms have come under scrutiny, their tangible impact on the American justice system remains almost completely unexplored. To fill this gap, we investigate the effect of the Correctional Offender...
Can AI Standards Have Politics?
Abstract How to govern a technology like artificial intelligence (AI)? When it comes to designing and deploying fair, ethical, and safe AI systems, standards are a tempting answer. By establishing the best way of doing something, standards might seem to provide plug-and-play guardrails for AI systems that avoid the costs of formal legal intervention. AI standards are all the more tantalizing...
Sovereignity and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Abstract This Essay explores the concept of sovereignty in relation to artificial intelligence. Although sovereignty has long been used to describe the status of nation states, the concept of sovereignty is used in multiple ways in the digital context. It is used to articulate state policies in relation to artificial intelligence (AI) and data, an assertion of state sovereignty that often has...
Challenging Minority Rule: Developing AI Standards that Serve the Majority World
Abstract This essay considers the emerging transnational governance frameworks for AI that are being developed under the auspices of a handful of powerful regulatory blocs, namely the United States, the European Union, and China, which are best positioned to influence emerging global standards. It argues that these represent a relatively homogenous set of global interests, and that while...
Voices In, Voices Out: Impacted Stakeholders and the Governance of AI
Abstract This Essay addresses reasons for impacted stakeholder involvement in AI governance, ranging from democratic accountability norms to principles of regulatory design. It evaluates several recent examples of both soft and hard law, noting a range of examples of impacted stakeholder participation. It closes with a critique: none of these laws adequately contemplates how to craft transparency...
The Pitfalls of the European Union’s Risk-Based Approach to Digital Rulemaking
Abstract The European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act takes a so-called risk-based approach to regulating artificial intelligence. In addition to being celebrated by industry, this risk-based approach is likely to spread due to the ‘Brussels Effect’ whereby EU legislation is taken as a model in other jurisdictions around the world. This article investigates how the AI Act’s risk-based...
Addressing the Challenge of Protecting Fundamental Rights Through AI Regulation in the European Union
Abstract In the face of current technological developments and the uptake in use of opaque algorithmic systems, democracy requires to strengthen the rule of law wherever public or private actors use algorithmic systems. The law must set out the requirements on AI systems’ creation, documentation and use that are necessary in a democratic society and organize appropriate accountability and...
Introduction: Generating Governance - An Essay Series on Strategies and Challenges in AI Regulation
In this essay series, the authors explore different aspects of emerging AI governance regimes. Though about quite different topics, the essays have many common threads. Several of the essays demonstrate that many of the difficulties with AI governance are less challenges of AI than challenges of governance generally—navigating power struggles and competing interests, getting buy-in, and avoiding...