By Jason Pielemeier, Executive Director, Global Network Initiative
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being sewn into all aspects of our society. It is being deployed in networks, apps, vehicles, schools, and hospitals. This patchwork of technological advancement offers many promises. And yet the tailors stitching it together are mostly working for a handful of powerful companies and governments, which dominate relevant conversations around AI business models, standards, and public policy. In order for this technology to help meet the broad range of needs and challenges facing the world, this must change.
The Global Network Initiative (GNI) and the Centre for Communications Governance (CCG) at the National Law University Delhi are excited to be a part of this change, including at the upcoming India AI Impact Summit, which aims to center a wide range of people and perspectives, including those who have so far been excluded from key conversations around AI. Through our Multistakeholder Approaches to Participation in AI Governance (MAP-AI) project, we are bringing several dozen academic and civil society leaders from the Global South to Delhi and organizing two events designed to integrate their perspectives into the broader conversations around several of the Summit’s key pillars and themes.
Civil society actors, including academics and independent technical experts, often face substantial barriers to participation in global governance, and the short history of discussions around AI is no exception. We are doing our part to mitigate some of these challenges, so that the Impact Summit can live up to its potential to bring Global South perspectives into greater focus. In addition to providing travel support, MAP-AI will host a full-day Shared Learning Forum on AI on 16 February, bringing together a wide range of academic and civil society leaders to exchange experiences, level set on existing AI governance processes, and consider how to enhance meaningful multistakeholder participation going forward.
Multistakeholderism is at once an abstract principle and a set of concrete practices. At a general level, it is a neologism that embodies notions of transparency, participation, due process, and accountability. In particular contexts, such as Internet governance, it is understood to entail a range of principles and approaches co-developed through a history of practice and collaborative reflection. On 17 February, we will host Reinforcements & Learning: A Multistakeholder Convening on AI Governance, a full-day, high-level event bringing together a diverse range of corporate, civil society, academic, and government speakers and participants. This convening will feature a range of sessions examining how to understand and engage in global AI governance, build contextualized AI infrastructure, and safely manage AI development and deployment, with the critical role of Global South actors as a cross-cutting theme.
The design and focus of this program has been informed by the perspectives, learnings, and observations we have collected through a series of pre-Summit conversations and convenings. We will share these “insights” prior to the Summit. After we have gathered further input through our tailored convenings in Delhi and our participation at the Summit, we will publish our reflections, including recommendations for enhancing multistakeholder AI governance at, and next steps for MAP-AI around future AI governance processes and events, including the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and its inaugural Global Dialogue on AI Governance.
We are excited to leverage the Impact Summit as a key opportunity to bring more voices into this conversation. And we look forward to building on this important inflection point through MAP-AI to ensure that we collectively embroider a diversity of perspectives and rights protections into the fabric of AI.