Options for a Global Citizens Assembly on AI
A policy and practice design lab
The UN High Level Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence is calling for new institutional arrangements to support the governance of AI that can deliver against the principle that AI should be governed “for all, by all”.
In parallel, the Coalition for a Global Citizens Assembly have launched plans for a permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly, to address humanity’s greatest challenges.
How could a Global Citizens Assembly on AI work? That’s the question we’ve explored, producing an options paper launched alongside the UN Summit of the Future in September 2024.
About the team
This is a collaborative process hosted by Connected by Data, working in partnership with ISWE Foundation. It is organised as a design lab under our Growing Data Governance Communities grant from The Omidyar Network.
This project is being coordinated by Tim Davies and Claire Mellier.
Resources
This report explores how global citizen deliberation, particularly drawing on the concept of a global citizens’ assembly, could and should shape the future of artificial intelligence. Drawing on an extended design lab of in-depth interviews and workshops that took place in mid-2024, it presents a series of options that illustrate a variety of opportunities to bring the voices of those affected by AI development and deployment into decision-making spaces, through processes that can deliver informed and inclusive dialogue.
The landscape of AI governance is rapidly evolving. There are open questions at many levels, from setting shared values and visions to guide AI development, to designing specific governance mechanisms or safety standards, and shaping the models and rules for individual and localized applications. There is growing consensus that these questions cannot be answered by the technology industry or individual governments alone. Global publics must be meaningfully involved.
The concept of a global citizens’ assembly is a powerful one: inviting individuals from across the globe to join in processes where they have access to expert insights, opportunities to learn, and facilitated space to deliberate together, bringing diverse perspectives and experiences to bear on questions of global importance. In this report we address how established and emerging sites of global AI development and governance can integrate citizen deliberation, setting out five template options: deliberative review of AI summits and scientific reports; an independent global assembly on AI; a series of distributed dialogues organized across the globe; a technology-enabled collective intelligence process; and commissioning of AI topics in other deliberative processes.
We present the strengths and weaknesses of these options, and outline additional design considerations they give rise to around recruitment, governance, agenda-setting, transnational dialogue and aggregation of findings, and the use of AI as a delivery tool. In doing so, we aim to support a critical assessment of emerging and future proposals for public participation on AI, both at the global and local level.
Events
We joined forces with Jed Miller of 3 Bridges and the Accountability Lab team to host a discussion in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 24th at 4 PM ET on the potential and the practicalities of bringing citizen voices from across the globe into AI governance
We will be sharing outputs from our design lab on options for a global citizens assembly on AI at TechSalon New York, ahead of the Civil Society Days of the UN Summit of the Future.
We held an interactive online workshop on Options for a Global Citizens Assembly on AI.
A Permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly: Options for an AI Focus
On 18th July 2024 we co-hosted a workshop at the “A Permanent Global Citizens’ Assembly: bringing humankind’s voice to world politics” conference at Jesus College Oxford exploring an early draft of our Options for a Global Citizens Assembly on AI paper.
Tim led a workshop session at the University of Westminister Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) conference ‘Regulating Digital Media in the Global South’ exploring different approaches to embedding public voice in data and AI governance.
As part of our design lab scoping options for a Global Citizens’ Assembly on AI (GCA on AI), Tim attended the launch of the findings from the Belgian Citizens Panel on AI at the Residence Palace in Brussels.
The Belgian Citizens Panel was composed of 60 randomly selected citizens invited to take part in three weekends of learning and deliberation in the first part of 2024 on question around the evolution of artificial intelligence in Europe. The Panel was organized as part of the Belgian presidency of the European Union, and was the first time a citizens assembly has been organized in this context.
On 24th May we organized a workshop in Brussels to explore design options for an inclusive global assembly addressing AI, as part of our design lab building off the Global Citizen Assembly Coalitions challenge paper.
Weeknotes