Governing AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly pervasive and essential to everyday life, enabling apps and various smart devices to autonomous vehicles and medical devices. Yet along with the promise of an increasingly interconnected and responsive Internet of Everything, AI is ushering in a host of legal, social, economic, and cultural challenges. The variety of stakeholders involved – spanning governments, industries, and users around the world – presents unique opportunities and governance questions for how best to facilitate the safe and equitable development, deployment, and use of innovative AI applications. Regulators around the world at the state, national, and international levels are actively considering next steps in regulating this suite of technologies, but with little sense of how their efforts can build on and reinforce one another. This state of affairs points to the need for novel approaches to nested governance, particularly among leading AI powers including the United States, European Union, and China. This Article provides an overview of AI and the numerous challenges it presents with special attention being paid to autonomous vehicles, along with exploring the lessons to be learned from polycentric governance frameworks and how to apply such social science constructs to the world of AI.