The (Most) Algorithmic Animal: Unknowable Causal Structures in the Information Age
Joanna J. Bryson, Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 8(2), 115–121, November 2022.
Rituals are a means of regulation — they are a means for maintaining coherence and attaining long-term goals, including social coherence. But does their efficacy depend entirely, or at all, on their opacity? In this requested commentary on Harvey Whitehouse’s new book, The Ritual Animal, I discuss the utility of costly rituals in an evolutionary context, and suggest that causal opacity is only one, potentially substitutable cost. I relate this to the urgent topical concerns of polarization and of regulating sustainability globally.
Author’s final version, from July 2022.
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Belgian and Flemish Policy Makers’ Guide to AI Regulation
Joanna J. Bryson, KCDS-CiTiP Fellow Lectures Series: Towards an AI Regulator?, October 11, 2022.
The regulation of AI is of pressing national and international concern, yet often distracted by arguments concerning definitions and myths concerning the relevance of opacity to regulation. All software, and indeed all technological means of automating aspects of human industry and behaviour, are products of human action, and as such their production can be regulated to ensure sufficient transparency to hold their developer and operators accountable for mishaps. Indeed the processes necessary to ensure such transparency—including process audits—will reduce harms by encouraging compliance to ever-increasing standards of best practice. In this paper, I discuss social consequences of AI and digital technology, and both social and industrial benefits to coordinating their production through good governance.
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Transnational Digital Governance and Its Impact on Artificial Intelligence
Mark Dempsey, Keegan McBride, Meeri Haataja, and Joanna J. Bryson, Handbook of AI Governance, May 2022.
This chapter explores the extant governance of AI and, in particular, what is arguably the most successful AI regulatory approach to date, that of the European Union. The chapter explores core definitional concepts, shared understandings, values, and approaches currently in play. It argues that not only are the Union’s regulations locally effective, but, due to the so-called “Brussels effect,” regulatory initiatives within the European Union also have a much broader global impact. As such, they warrant close consideration. Open access version.
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Reflections on the EU’s AI Act and How We Could Make It Even Better (pdf)
Meeri Haataja and Joanna J. Bryson, CPI TechREG Chronicle, March 2022
Meeri Haataja and I wrote two papers (really, originally one long one) to inform the writing of the EU’s AI Act (AIA). Because of the importance of getting the material out to policy makers while they were still writing, we published in essentially a newsletter, who promised to publish the second part, a supplement about the costs in the next issue, then didn’t, so it’s just in arxiv for now. See What Costs Should We Expect From the EU’s AI Act?, SocArXiv, 2021
The main thrust of this article is that there is a lot of good work done in the AIA that some people with vested interests are unjustly attacking, but there are also a few things that can be improved. This may be interesting even if you don’t care about law in the EU, just if you are trying to regulate AI or the digital in your own country. See also my Wired article expanding on one aspect here: the definition of AI used in the AIA, and how that relates to the purpose of AI regulation.
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Untangling Agile Government: On the Dual Necessities of Structure and Agility
Keegan McBride, Maximilian Kupi and Joanna J. Bryson, Agile Government: Emerging Perspectives in Public Management, 21-34, 2022.
This is a super, super important topic I expect to be coming back to. The myth that dismantling infrastructure, aka “decentralising,” necessarily produces agility is pernicious and facilitates an assault on the rule of law. Open access version.
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Two Solicited Chapters for the Collection The Love Makers
Coordinated by Aifric Campbell (2021)
Most of the book consists of her novella, Scarlett and Gurl, which I strongly, strongly recommend to everyone interested in the role of sentient-seeming AI in human society.
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