The societal function of governance; the relationship between regulation and innovation; and how this understanding should be applied to AI.

This post was written by Thomas Brcic. It is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written.

governance

/ˈɡʌvənəns/

noun

the act or process of governing or overseeing the control and direction of something

“I like to break things and regulators create red tape which, well, limits my ability to do this”. It is upon hearing this line over the other side of the table whilst having lunch at a workshop that my ears - at that time not particularly tuned on any one spot of dialogue - prick up and I cannot help but respond in intervention.

Oftentime in the definition of something so general and broad, explanatory value may be found in the description of what that something is not, as opposed to what it is. It is via this approach of a negative definition that I’ll deliberately choose to define ‘governance’, a response to a startlingly large misconceived understanding I’ve noticed in my personal conversations and wider attitudes to norm-shaping and regulation.

“If I understand right, you mean to say that regulation inhibits innovation and so naturally interferes in the process of creation, right?” In affirmation the man sitting opposite me nods, and expands on the statement he made. He is interning at a fintech startup and explains that due to a particular subset of laws of an EU Regulation, their work is continually inhibited by approval and permitting processes.

This notion of governance is precisely the starting point from where we can chart what it precisely is not intended to be; stifling. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll refer primarily to regulation - just one of several tools in the governance toolbox, though the most severe and as a result, the most contentious. Regulation and innovation have been presented time-honoured as mighty adversaries, and this understanding has also made its way into the world of AI development, inviting with it an echoing chorus of tirades in the wake of regulatory proposals and evaluations on both sides of the Atlantic, where most such developments take place. Tellingly, a recent executive brief by DigitalEurope - a consortium of 117 corporate members (comprising the usual names of Google, Apple, M...

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