Institutional Innovation and Artificial Intelligence

To witness its decline is to see a world emerging. Inheritors of a world we will cocreate with engineered artefacts that deal with tasks successfully with a goal in view, we are now witnessing the ascension of artificial agency. It is a human project in information societies enabled by novel forms of political or collective agency, and artificial agency.

It is the sum of the actions taken by every human online and offline, digital and analogue. This revolution is not in factories. It is not industrial. It is in the infosphere. It includes offline, analogue and digital spaces, cyberspace, information organisms or “inforgs”, information entities and assemblages, information agents, and their projects, interactions, and mutual relations that flourish in information-thick environments.

This revolution is not about the rise of a creative class. It is about the transformations of agency, or the ability to interact with and learn from a world adapting to the digital revolution. It is a divorce between the ability to frame problems efficiently, and the need to be intelligent while solving them.

Before this shift, upheavals like Britain’s Industrial Revolution, chained to its colonial plantation economy, irreversibly changed our self-understanding, our reality, and our experience of reality. Moreover, traces of each revolution including the Enlightenment have transported prejudgements seamlessly into the present that buttress difficulties that sustain intergenerational immobility and inherited inequality.

But this digital bend in the river is toward a socially preferable (equitable) and environmentally sustainable future. Anyone who is not perplexed by this turn has not fully grasped its magnitude. Humanity experienced a world before and after the alphabet, ironworking, the Gutenberg press, the steam engine, and the iPod click wheel. We are the last generation to experience a pre-digital, purely analogue, offline reality. The inheritors of edited life and AI-Assemblages will know nothing of it.

Our special place is to be enfolded inside the crevices of a fully analogue life and the increasingly digital world of synthetic life and neural lace. We shaped the Church of the Assumption, Queens Hall, The Red House, Queen’s Royal College, UTT, UWI and NAPA, and then these structures shaped us. We are at the beginning of shaping the new digital architectures.

The key questions are how, when, where and by whom the impact of artificial agency will be felt. In 2004, the UN set up the Group of Governmental Experts on Information Security to agree on rules to guide conduct in cyberspace. The fifth meeting of the group in 2017 ended in a standoff. There was no agreement on whether international humanitarian law and existing laws on self-defence and state responsibility should apply in cyberspace. A report was never submitted. It is uncertain whether the group of experts will ever meet again, and AI has changed the terrain.

Non-state grievance and remedy mechanisms can provide effective redress for some but by no means all of the inevitable adverse impacts that AI will produce. Many of the existing formal and informal institutions that govern various fields of social endeavour are ill-suited to addressing the challenges posed by AI. Institutional innovation is needed to guarantee appropriate governance of AI-Assemblages, and to support the principle of “explicability” to address the inevitable adverse effects of AI.

The accompanying uneasiness has led to a number of international policy frameworks that include:

The six most high-profile initiatives from this compendium are (1) Asilomar, (2) Montreal (3) IEEE, (4) EGE, (5) AIUK and (6) Partnership.