Swae & The Future Society on the Governance of AI

We’re very excited to announce our first pilot with the AI Initiative, an initiative of The Future Society, in which Swae will conduct Sentiment Analysis on the content of the AI-Initiative’s crowdsourced global civic debate on the rise and governance of Artificial Intelligence.

Background on the Global Debate on AI Regulation

In September 2017, the Future Society and the AI-initiative, in partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, launched a global civic debate that invited members of the public to crowdsource thoughts and opinions about how artificial intelligence technologies across business, government, society should be governed to achieve a beneficial future for all. Led over a seven-month period, The Future Society’s collective intelligence effort assembled over 2000 diverse and multi-lingual participants (citizens, practitioners, experts, and researchers working on AI, robotics, cyber, public policy, international relations and economics) through offline and online event held globally, who collectively shared over 3,300 contributions in five languages. The collection of opinions provides novel perspectives on the governance of AI and insights on how the AI revolution is playing out in different geographies, its consequences and how they need to be governed to capture the upsides, minimize the downsides and ensure that its benefits reach everyone. The availability of the platform in different languages was a conscious effort by The Future Society to design a truly inclusive conversation, attract the largest number of global voices, and shape a *global policy framework that aligned to our local cultural values.

The Debate’s Relevance to Swae

Although Swae’s primary platform is a distributed decision-making tool supported by AI, we are offering important sentiment analysis capabilities for administrators inside organizations and cities. We’re therefore leveraging this pilot opportunity to help build out our capabilities to improve our general offering and support our mission of making collective decision making an intelligent and efficient alternative to the status quo. In this pilot, we will conduct data analysis and experiment with data science techniques and existing NLP/NLG APIs to see what kinds of insights we can derive from the collection of rich opinions and discussion threads. We hope the insights we can reveal help us visualize the commonalities in perspective from geographically dispersed regions, highlight unique differences and previously unrevealed solutions or suggestions on how to govern the exponential growth of AI to ensure it’s a net positive and prosperity-enabling force for all humanity. In a later post, we will share some high level findings about the global sentiment expressed about the future growth and regulation of AI in our analysis.

Presentation of Findings at the European Parliament

The results of the debate, along with any meaningful insights we may uncover from our analysis during the pilot, will all be shared at the official launch of a report at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium on September 26th. For those interested in attending, the event offers some interesting interactive workshops with leaders in the Machine Learning field, immersive experiences with an artistic design installation, and the opportunity to take a “seat at the table” to shape global AI policy.

About Swae

Swae is an AI-driven decision-making and governance platform that helps raise the quality and inclusivity of decisions within organizations, allowing people to participate directly in key strategy, budget, operational decisions and create solutions from the bottom up that can be institutionalized. By combining anonymity, artificial, and collective intelligence Swae helps organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders, discover new unrevealed ideas, and collectively build bottom-up solutions to strategy and resource allocation decisions, and improving overall decision quality without significant work for management.

About the The Future Society & AI-Initiative

The AI Initiative is an initiative of Harvard University’s The Future Society, a global non-profit think-and-do-tank dedicated to better understanding questions of impact and governance of emerging technologies. Created in 2015, The Future Society gathers students, researchers, alumni, faculty, business leaders, policy makers and experts from around the world ,through it’s expertise in Research, Convenings and Executive Education, to help shape the global policy framework for emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence.