I'm sure you've guessed, from the title you mention, that I do see the rise of ethics—and I explicitly wouldn't include the Montreal declaration in this, because I don't think it's a good example of it.... There are certainly many cases of ethical frameworks that provide no clear institutional framework beyond them. A lot of my work has been focused, essentially, on getting people to either do human rights and governance, or, if they will do ethics, then to take ethics seriously and really ensure that the ethical frameworks developed as a result of that are rigorous and robust.
At the end of the article you mentioned there is literally a framework of criteria on how to go through this: external participation, external oversight, transparent decision-making and non-arbitrary lists of standards. Ethics don't substitute fundamental rights.
To come back to the example you mentioned on self-regulation on the Internet and how we all assumed that that would be the path that would safeguard citizens' autonomy, I think that's been one of the key challenges. This argument has been misused so much by private companies that then say, for example, “Well, we have a million likes, and you only have 500,000 votes. Surely our likes are worth as much as your votes.” I don't even need to explain that in great detail. It's just this logic of lots of clicks and lots of likes surely can be seen as the same thing as votes. This, in a democratic context, is extremely difficult.
Lastly, you specifically mentioned exporting AI to authoritarian regimes. I think there is a strong link between the debates we have about exporting AI to authoritarian regimes and how we trade in and export surveillance technologies. There are a lot of technologies that are extremely powerful that are getting into the wrong hands right now. Limiting that or ensuring, through agreements like the Wassenaar arrangement and others, that there is dual-use control for certain types of technology will become increasingly important.
We have existing mechanisms. We have existing frameworks to do this, but unless we're willing to implement those and sometimes also say that we will do it collectively as a group, even if this means having slightly less—and I emphasize “slightly less”—economic growth as a result of this, we can still also say we're taking more leadership on this issue. It's going to be very difficult to see where these short-term economic gains are going to meaningfully provide for a human rights environment we would want to stand behind in the years and decades to come.