Abstract: More and more governments have started releasing their national strategies outlining priorities in adopting artificial intelligence (AI). This presentation focuses on the strategies adopted by more than a dozen countries between 2017 and 2019, reflecting on the dominant regulatory discourses and the (re)definition of the public-private ordering in the making. It contributes to current policy discussions by conceptually structuring the debates and offering a critical perspective of the governance of digital technologies of the future, distilling the proposed approaches for AI and their complex effects from a hybridity perspective. Using qualitative content analysis and comparative methods, the strategies of Canada, China, France, Finland, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and United States are assessed to determine the governance approach envisioned in the sovereigntist AI projects. It argues that purposeful design is at work in the synergistic interplay between the public and the private sector in the governance of AI, highlighting a hybrid configuration that is ethics-oriented rather than rule-based.

Bio: Roxana Radu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the GTGLab and a Research Associate at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, working on Internet regulation, algorithms and knowledge production in the public sphere. Until May 2018, she was Programme Manager at the Geneva Internet Platform, a dialogue and capacity building centre for Internet governance and digital policy and was chairing the non-for-profit Internet Society-Switzerland. Roxana holds a PhD in International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Switzerland) and received the Swiss Network of International Studies Award for the Best PhD Thesis in 2017. Her interdisciplinary research and publications focus on international governance and global Internet policy-making.