Governance with AI: Shaping sustainable futures and decision making

Description

This presentation focusses on the role of AI in governance and decision making with regards to sustainable futures, using Mobility as a Service (MaaS) as case study. It combines field work and a narrative literature review. The presentation contributes a novel approach towards understanding the role of AI in governance processes, and implications for social and environmental sustainability.

We use MaaS as a case study, as it is regarded as key innovation for sustainable mobility, with data and AI playing a central role. This presentation demonstrates how crucial it is that sustainability goals play a central role in the governance of MaaS, and how there is a real danger for sustainability to not be part of MaaS systems.

Using MaaS as a point of departure, the presentation abstracts broader issues of AI in governance and decision making with regards to sustainable futures. It demonstrates how the performativity and real-time dimension that algorithms add to governance requires co-creation and collaboration between developers, policymakers, citizens and algorithms to efficiently correspond to sustainability challenges. At the same time, it is crucial that objectives and values of algorithms are decided collectively by human private and public actors to ensure alignment of interests and public value.

Regarding the potential implications of governance with AI for public value and sustainability goals, the presentation shows that a balanced hybrid governance approach between policymakers, industry players and algorithms (as non-human actors) with explicit and dynamic feedback mechanisms is required, so that public and sustainability goals are ensured. This entails preventing governance from degenerating into algocracy (i.e., power lies with algorithms rather than with people) through transparency and democratic deliberation of sustainability objectives. To ensure public value, these objectives need to be tailored to local sustainability priorities and need to manage algorithmic biases that might result to social injustices related to algorithmic values and data representativeness as well as environmental concerns related to environmentally harmful data usage.


Overall, this presentation proposes a conceptualisation of the term hybrid governance that highlights the role of AI as actor, and captures how the interplay between human actors and AI algorithms in (MaaS) governance creates new accountabilities, opportunities, and risks for sustainability.

Period	31 May 2023
Event title	Sustainable AI Across Borders : Bonn Sustainable AI Conference 2023
Event type	Conference
Location	Bonn , GermanyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International