Five AIMS - Lessons from Internet Governance for Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies

Days away from the Paris AI Action Summit, the elaboration of the emerging framework to govern the development and adoption of AI technologies is at the heart of heated, sometimes overwhelming debates and controversies. While new AI models are being released at an accelerating pace, with ever greater promises of game-changing applications, revolutionary disruptions, and prophecies of geopolitical shifts, AI governance remains partially undertheorised.

To help scaffold coherent, coordinated, and enforceable rules and institutions, Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng, Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement) and Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton, Kieron O’Hara, emeritus fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and Pierre Noro, advisor of the PSIA Tech & Global Affairs Innovation Hub, reinterpret the Four Internet models elaborated by Hall and O'Hara in their 2018 article and in their influential book Four Internets: Data, Geopolitics, and the Governance of Cyberspace (Oxford UP, 2021) in regard to AI technologies.

This translation, grounded in an analysis of the historical, socio-economic, and ideological differences distinguishing the context that shaped Internet governance and the current one, yields many enlightening insights and is the foundation of five Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies (AIMS):

• Open AIMS: Fostering openness and transparency, common ownership and collaboration, interoperability.
• Bourgeois AIMS: Fostering rights and civility with procedural rules and codes
• Paternal AIMS: Mandating outcomes and confining uses.
• Commercial AIMS: Allowing market solutions to resource allocation problems.
• Hacker AIMS: Libertarian, anti-authoritarian, decentralised approach valorising software skills, resisting censorship, and empowering individuals and communities to make and reshape the information space.
   

As narratives, the AIMS do not aspire to crystal clarity, but rather are intended as sensemaking aids; the characterisations above […] may already help categorize and interpret discourses, stances, and proposals.

With many illustrations to exemplify their core tenets, their limits and their intersections, this paper offers the Five AIMS as cardinal concepts to help AI governance stakeholders, especially public and private decisionmakers, navigate the upcoming AI Action Summit and future governance conversation.

Concluding on a set of ongoing research questions reflecting open policy challenges, it is a foundational step towards cementing the Five AIMS as a suitable framework for understanding the governance of AI.

Learn more by reading the full policy brief: Five AIMS: Lessons from Internet Governance for Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies (PDF, 368 Ko)