Dr Laura James's writings

Testing the Uber self-driving system. Image:  ABC News In a complex world, with technologies and ideas spreading more quickly than ever before, our traditional ways of balancing the needs of society and industry may not work so well, and so we need to be experimenting with alternatives. So last week,  Doteveryone  and  Dark Matter Laboratories  brought together a small diverse group to explore the idea of  regulatory experiments,  and what a network of organisations working on, and learning from these, might look like and do. Moving from “regulation” to “governance” We realised during the day that we were actually interested in  governance experiments . Regulation is a specific form of governance. It makes people think of  regulators  and therefore take a more limited view of the possibilities. Opening it up and thinking instead of  governance  means we can think about very different ideas, such as  ennobli...

The  AI for Global Good summit  brought together UN agencies, researchers and innovators to explore the potential of AI to address the  Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) . This was the second summit, and came with expectations and scheduling that it was time to get some new collaborative projects underway. It’s hard to tell whether it met that aim — several groups of projects (mostly proposed, or indeed underway, before the summit) were showcased and encouraged participation (and resourcing) from those present. The idea of a community, in the sense it is often meant, was less clearly supported — how will participants (both in the room, and following online) stay in touch and build up these new ideas? The summit did succeed in showcasing projects and ideas across sector and subject boundaries, and it seemed like the right people were in the room to start planning some concrete projects. At the same time, it felt like some important things were missing. One of those t...