Research project The Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence and its Democratic Challenges

With more than 500 AI governance initiatives launched in the last five years, this four-year research project allows two political scientists and one philosopher to redress this.

Assuming that a key property of good governance is democratic legitimacy, and that a study of AI governance should primarily focus on the global level, the project’s aim is twofold: (1) to develop a democratic theory of global AI governance, and (2) to apply this theory to assess the democratic quality of existing instances of global AI governance. The overarching research question is: under what conditions is global AI governance democratic? Relying on methods like conceptual and normative analysis, and a coherentist account of justification, the project answers this question through three work packages: (1) a suitable theoretical framework is developed (months 1-12); (2) this framework is drawn upon to develop a democratic theory of global AI governance (months 13-34); (3) which is then applied to instances of global AI governance (months 35-48). A general evaluative typology is developed, mapping out the democratic demands on existing entities and their decision-making.