The Global Institutional Governance of AI: A Four-Dimensional Perspective

Abstract The present debate about the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) is dominated by a narrative of a “global race toward the regulation of AI.” Such a narrative bears serious dangers and should be rephrased as the “race toward the global regulation of AI” to adequately address the cross-cutting, cross-boundary, and cross-cultural nature of these technologies. If the debate about the future regulation of AI is to efficiently address the serious dangers and potentially existential risks related to AI, then it should be tied to other global governance issues, such as those summarized by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For this endeavor to be successful, the substantive questions of regulation must be combined with efforts to reform the present international system with a view to establishing a more efficient and coherent global institutional framework. It is important to be mindful of past obstacles in the reform of existing international organizations and to avoid the need for another global cataclysm to trigger institutional reform; thus, the article follows the idea that cognitive change leads to the transformation of international organizations. As both a technology aimed to replicate the human mind and an example of an important linguistic trend of a rise in essentially oxymoronic concepts, AI is deemed to provide the right point of departure to ponder future modes of human cognition – modes that reflect Einstein’s description of a world as a “four-dimensional space – time continuum,” – which may help to imagine the contours of a future global institutional framework.