Powerful artificial intelligence systems can be of enormous benefit to society and help us tackle some of the world’s biggest problems. Machine learning models are already playing a significant role in diagnosing diseases, accelerating scientific research, boosting economic productivity and cutting energy usage by optimising electricity flows on power grids, for example.
It would be a tragedy if such gains were jeopardised as a result of a backlash against the technology. But that danger is growing as abuses of AI technology multiply, in areas such as unfair discrimination, disinformation and fraud, as Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers of AI”, warned last month on resigning from Google. That makes it imperative that governments move fast to regulate the technology appropriately and proportionately.
How to do so will be one of the greatest governance challenges of our age. Machine learning systems, which can be deployed across millions of use cases, defy easy categorisation and can throw up numerous problems for regulators. This fast-evolving technology can also be used in diffuse, invisible and ubiquitous ways, at massive scale. But, encouragingly, regulators around the world are finally starting to tackle the issues.