AI offers significant opportunities but twelve governance challenges must be addressed says UK Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
As governments across the world grapple with the question of if and how AI should be governed, the UK is positioned as a centre of AI research and practice with a reputation for creativity and international trust in its regulatory policy and institutions. The November Global AI Safety Summit, to be held at Bletchley Park, provides a golden opportunity for Britain to lead world thinking and practice on AI governance.
An interim report published today by the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee sets out the Committee’s findings from its inquiry so far, and the twelve essential challenges that AI governance must meet if public safety and confidence in AI are to be secured.
The twelve challenges of AI governance that must be addressed by policymakers:
The Bias challenge: AI can introduce or perpetuate biases that society finds unacceptable.
The Privacy challenge: AI can allow individuals to be identified and personal information about them to be used in ways beyond what the public wants.
The Misrepresentation challenge: AI can allow the generation of material that deliberately misrepresents someone’s behaviour, opinions or character.
The Access to Data challenge: The most powerful AI needs very large datasets, which are held by few organisations.
The Access to Compute challenge: The development of powerful AI requires significant compute power, access to which is limited to a few organisations.
The Black Box challenge: Some AI models and tools cannot explain why they produce a particular result, which is a challenge to transparency requirements.
The Open-Source challenge: Requiring code to be openly available may promote transparency and innovation; allowing it to be proprietary may concentrate market power but allow more dependable regulation of harms.
The Intellectual Property and Copyright Challenge: Some AI models and tools make use of other people's content: policy must establish the rights of the originators of this content, and these rights must be enforced.
The Liability challenge: If AI models and tools are used by third parties to do harm, policy must establish whether developers or providers of the technology bear any liability for harms done.
The Employment challenge: AI will disrupt the jobs that people do and that are available to be done. Policy makers must anticipate and manage the disruption.
The International Coordinationchallenge: AI is a global technology, and the development of governance frameworks to regulate its uses must be an international undertaking.
The Existential challenge: Some people think that AI is a major threat to human life. If that is a possibility, governance needs to provide protections for national security.
The interim report urges greater international cooperation to address these twelve challenges. It welcomes the November AI summit at Bletchley Park and calls on the UK Government to invite “as wide a range of countries as possible” to “advance a shared international understanding of the challenges of AI as well as its opportunities”.