The printing press, AI governance and sustainability

It might seem odd to start an article about artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability with an image of a medieval printing press: this slow and cumbersome mechanical object, with its manual labour input, seems out of place in our fast-paced virtual world.

But the printing press has lessons for us about managing our virtual world, and in particular AI, as I discuss in a post that has just been published on the Global Policy Journal website. My article argues that while the current focus of debate around AI has been on its implications for employment (understandably), we also need to step back and think about AI’s implications for the management of knowledge itself. I summarize the content of my post below, before concluding with some additional thoughts about what this means for the sustainable transformation. For those of you in a hurry, the “summary of the summary” is as follows:

• History suggests AI will impact our society’s values, institutions and laws.
• Traditional human strengths will be needed to develop AI governance.
• Effective AI governance will make its transformation contribution more credible.

Going beyond the printing press analogy

When the internet started to become dominant in our lives, 20 or so years ago, it was sometimes compared to the invention of the printing press. AI now promises to take this analogy a stage further – it will affect not just how knowledge is distributed, but how it is generated, interpreted and legitimized. So we are not just generating new tools, we are generating a new epistemic (i.e. verification) architecture as the process shifts from human and group judgement to algorithmic synthesis.

As the article explains, the printing press helped (as part of the Renaissance) to dismantle the Church’s monopoly over knowledge distribution and, as importantly, seeded new social imaginaries (a 20th century term describing the values, institutions and laws which we use to visualise and define our society). AI now promises to both refine these social imaginaries and create new ones – perhaps without our consent.

AI governance requires human strengths

I suggest that this could be seen as a counter-Renaissance – something akin to a dystopian novel or film, where we are conditioned how to act by those who own the AI system architecture. So, I argue, we need to think in an abstract way about the governance of these meaning systems themselves: this, after all, has the potential to disrupt science, education and work – amongst many other things.

My argument in the article is that the demand for human strengths – creativity, empathy, ethical judgment, and narrative framing – will grow, not decline, as we try to find answers to difficult issues around AI governance. I don’t think that resolving these issues will be easy. The Renaissance, with its limited number of geographies, was aided by the rediscovery of works from the classical world, helping create an intellectually-coherent background: with AI now a global phenomenon, finding a similar common space may be difficult. But we do have to become co-architects of the new system – this is a responsibility that can’t be outsourced.

AI can contribute to sustainability but credibility is key

The article doesn’t go into what AI means for sustainability. But I’d like to make one broad point here. Transformation to a sustainable economy will require a considerable change. As we already know, this will involve politically and economically difficult decisions: we need an accepted way to generate, discuss and verify the data used in these decisions. AI is already helping to generate and interpret this data but needs to be credible and neutral: sustainability values, institutions and laws (back to those “social imaginaries”) aren’t deeply embedded in most societies and will be open to challenge, particularly given popular scepticism about the motivation of many policy actors (including AI providers).  Belief in effective AI governance could boost this credibility.

This article is also published on LinkedIn. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.