Speech given at Int. Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Risks, Regulations and Roadmaps, Dec 7th 2023. The conference addresses the balancing act of regulation: seeking to ensure neither too little nor too much. While we'll present and discuss major societal threats posed by AI, we'll also consider the missed opportunities if stringent regulations hinder AI-based scientific, economic, and general human progress.

Short abstract
The rapid proliferation of generative AI and large language models has recently captured global attention, shedding light on the profound potential for AI technologies to reshape knowledge production, business practices, and the very fabric of our daily lives.

While AI offers solutions to some of humanity's most pressing challenges, it has also raised significant concerns surrounding the associated risks. These concerns include the emergence of deep fakes as a threat to democracy, the potential development of super-human intelligent machines as warned by leading experts, and the worrisome trends of data commodification, extraction, and AI talent concentration that could lead to monopolization by big tech platforms, creating winner-takes-all scenarios.

In response to these challenges, a multitude of stakeholders, including national governments, international organizations, think tanks, and civil society groups, are actively exploring ways to govern AI technologies for the benefit of humanity. The presentation will provide an overview of select international governance measures and the underlying principles guiding them. It will delve into how high-level principles within existing governance, may inform a "humans in the loop" approach drawing on selected international methodologies and tools. The paper will conclude by reflecting on emerging challenges and limitations in current governance efforts also taking into account the geopolitical risks of an increasing North-South Divide.

Bio
Hanne Shapiro has a master’s in social science. Following employment as innovation director at Danish Technological Institute, she created her own company 6 ½ years ago.  She is a member of the University of Berkeley Working Group: The Future of Work and Labor Reimagined, and a research network on digital credentials infrastructures learning working trajectories impacted by AI, and managed by the George Washington University, Institute for Public Policy. 

She has published extensively on the impact of AI on work and our societies. In 2016, she was the key author of the report Kunstig Intelligens, Morgendagens Job og Samfund, which was commissioned by the SIRI Commission formed by the Danish Engineering Confederation and the Danish member of Parliament Ida Auken.   

During the last four years, she has participated in a multi-country research study: Digital Futures of Work funded by the government of Singapore. In that context, she pursued two lines of research, respectively looking into government policies to govern AI, and secondly, looking into university strategies relating to AI and more broadly digital transformation.  In that context, she studied emergent government models for AI, and more specifically how countries such as Finland and Singapore through the deployment of futures methods aim to embrace strategic uncertainties and opportunities afforded by AI with so far two published papers:  Finland: AI, policy innovation and the future of work and learning; and Digital Evolution of Higher Education.