The Artificial Intelligence Commission
My conversation with Prof. Ifeoma Ajunwa | Edition #295
Last week, I spoke with Prof. Ifeoma Ajunwa from the Emory School of Law about her fascinating paper, “The Artificial Intelligence Commission.”
In our 55-minute conversation, we discussed the current regulatory landscape in the United States, how a federal AI commission should work, AI regulation challenges, global AI governance, AI use by the government, emerging AI challenges, and more.
Prof. Ajunwa is proposing an ambitious and innovative governance approach to AI in the U.S., and I am joining her call for lawmakers to embrace her blueprint and make it a reality.
If you are interested in AI and want to see it governed properly, or if you are a policymaker or a change advocate anywhere in the world, do not miss our conversation. You can watch the full conversation here.
Video chapters:
00:00 - Regulating AI through legal principles
05:10 - Federal AI governance in the United States
07:47 - Making a federal AI agency a reality
10:59 - Is a global AI governance approach possible?
14:08 - What the AI race is about
18:36 - The shortcomings of “Constitutional AI”
21:53 - The legal system as a form of control in AI
24:44 - Anthropic vs. the Department of War
28:01 - The AI Commission
33:39 - Governing the government's use of AI
40:32 - A new approach to innovation
47:41 - Personal AI use and thoughts on AI
51:25 - A message to the next generation
The structural challenge Ajunwa's blueprint has to solve before anything else is the talent pipeline. Every previous technology-specific federal commission was eventually captured by the industry it regulated because the people qualified to do the regulating came from the same labour pool as the people being regulated. The FCC and telecoms. The FAA and aviation. The revolving door is a structural feature of specialist regulation, not a corruption problem.
For AI the pipeline problem is worse because the expertise is newer and more concentrated. The population who understand frontier model development deeply enough to write meaningful regulation might be measured in hundreds, and most of them currently work at the same five companies. An AI commission staffed by people who dont understand the technology produces compliance theatre. One staffed by people who do produces regulatory capture. Navigating between those two failure modes is the actual governance problem, and its harder than the policy design.