Methodology for a Sustained Global Deliberation on AI

Proposal

< " A global AI constitution produced on the basis of this three-tier process would not be binding in the way treaty law is binding, but rather in the same way that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is binding: unenforceable by any court, while taking on real weight over decades. It would be a set of principles that governments invoke, that NGOs cite and for which states and other actors pay a reputational price for flouting. Defection or refusal to participate would be costly. " >

Hélène Landemore:

"The first tier, an LLM-mediated global consultation, could produce an interim draft within months: a minimal, broadly endorsed statement of what a large fraction of the world population wants this technology to do — and never do. Run well, this tier would need not flatten its results into a single global average. It could also be broken out by region, so the consultation would surface areas where preferences genuinely diverge — say, between a Western emphasis on individual data privacy and precautionary restriction, and a data-sovereignty and development-first framing more common in Africa and India — rather than papering over real disagreement in pursuit of a tidy global consensus.

The second tier would be more logistically demanding and slower to organize, but still fast enough to fit the timeline at hand: an actual online global deliberation, with participants interacting with each other in real time rather than only with an AI, mediated by AI facilitators. This would produce a richer text than the first tier alone, testing and presumably sometimes replacing the recommendations that emerged from the LLM-aggregated input and making sure the LLM-provided justifications are enriched, corrected and checked by actual humans.

The third tier would reach deeper still into humanity’s social fabric. We could hold local and national citizens’ assemblies on key issues in every country and region, both in person and online, ideally combined with referenda where possible, then feed the results into a concluding global citizens’ assembly that could ratify, amend or supersede the earlier floors as time allows. If the clock turns out to be as short as feared, we would not be left with nothing. If it turns out to be longer, the deeper, slower tiers would simply take over before the first floor ever hardens into something unexamined.

There are other ways one could imagine a sustained global deliberation on AI. But regardless of the particular design, the first step toward something like this is to get the powers that be to commit — and to put their money where their mouth is. So let’s say it plainly and personally."

(https://www.noemamag.com/how-to-give-everyday-people-a-say-in-ai-governance/)