Information & Ethics committee  I think the automated drones, or what are termed LAWS—lethal autonomous weapons systems—are definitely areas where further focus is acquired. I would also say that what's been mentioned here about the spread or proliferation of surveillance and AI technologies that can be misused by authoritarian governments is another an area where there is an urgent need to look more closely.

Information & Ethics committee  I couldn't agree more. There are also cases, as best as I'm aware, in California, where it's also already being debated—to find mechanisms whereby automated systems like bots would be required to declare themselves as bots. Especially in the context of elections, and also in other cases, that can be quite helpful.

Information & Ethics committee  In the experience of what I've seen, when people try to develop general regulations for all of AI or all of algorithms or all of technology, it never ends up being quite appropriate to the task. I think I agree with Mr. Bengio in the sense that, if we're talking about certain types of international regulation, for example, it would be focused on automated killer systems, let's say, and there is already an extensive process going on in this work in Geneva and in other parts of the world, which I think is extremely important.

Information & Ethics committee  Are there countries that regulate AI directly, as a general thing, that I am aware of right now? No. There are AI-specific regulations in different fields that you will find; for example, the general data protection regulation in Europe is one of those cases.

Information & Ethics committee  I think right now we live in a situation where these decisions are overwhelmingly made by private companies, and almost none of these decisions are made by democratically elected governments, and this is the problem for citizens, for rights, for governance. It poses a considerable challenge, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.

Information & Ethics committee  There's a challenge in that if we assume human intervention alone will fix things, we will also be in a difficult situation because human beings, for all sorts of reasons, often do not make the best decisions. We have many hundreds of years of experience of how to deal with bad human decision-making and not so much experience in how to deal with mainly automated human decision-making, but the best types of decisions tend to come from a good configuration of interactions between humans and machines.

Information & Ethics committee  I think there is a distinction to be made between online platforms and media platforms. I think there is a substantive difference. I don't think it's alway helpful to just focus on the content. In a lot of these cases, the solutions to this tend to be more procedural and tend to be more, let's say, organizational.

Information & Ethics committee  If it's illegal in that specific jurisdiction, then steps definitely need to be taken to ensure that.... But a lot of the time, at least in my experience of looking at content moderation, it's not so much about legal or illegal; it's more content that creates a certain atmosphere, and the challenges of that certain atmosphere chill speech and make minorities, different genders or people with different sexual orientations much less comfortable speaking, and that impoverishes the public sphere.

Information & Ethics committee  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.

Information & Ethics committee  I think threats of this kind are quite indicative of a general regulatory challenge, which is that every country wants to be the leading country on AI right now, and that doesn't always lead to the best regulatory climate for the citizens of those countries. There seems to have been some kind of agreement between the Government of the Netherlands and the automobile industry which is developing AI into self-driving cars to not look so closely when they build a factory there, in order to ensure that as a result of building that factory, they will bring jobs and investment to these countries.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. In principle, I think that's exactly where things should be going. That's exactly the type of proposal that I was trying to suggest as to where things should be moving. What I would add is that, of course by doing so, you don't want to stifle innovation, so you would need some kind of threshold on top of which, let's say for publicly traded companies or for companies of a certain size, there's a certain impact.

Information & Ethics committee  It's an extremely good question. At this point there are quite a lot of proposals out there on what it could be, but I think the first thing, to come straight to the point, is that transparency or explainability itself is insufficient. Just saying we can explain what it does, and therefore it's enough, is not enough.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak here. I really appreciate the standing committee dealing with these issues. My name is Ben Wagner. I'm with the Privacy and Sustainable Computing Lab in Vienna. We've been working closely on these issues for some time, specifically trying to understand how to safeguard human rights in a world where artificial intelligence and algorithms are becoming extremely common.