How could the United Nations Global Digital Compact prevent cultural imposition and hermeneutical injustice?

Patterns (N Y)

Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Published: November 2024

AI Article Synopsis

  • Geopolitical superpowers are pursuing different approaches to digital regulation, highlighting the need for a global compact to avoid cultural imposition and injustice in AI legislation.
  • Diverse regulatory systems may lead to authoritarian control or corporate malpractice, exacerbating existing power imbalances between the global North and South.
  • The proposed Global Digital Compact includes two principles: recognizing shared benefits and harms, and establishing coordinated standards to ensure fair representation of the global South's perspectives.

Article Abstract

As the geopolitical superpowers race to regulate the digital realm, their divergent rights-centered, market-driven, and social-control-based approaches require a global compact on digital regulation. If diverse regulatory jurisdictions remain, forms of domination entailed by cultural imposition and hermeneutical injustice related to AI legislation and AI systems will follow. We argue for consensual regulation on shared substantive issues, accompanied by proper standardization and coordination. Failure to attain consensus will fragment global digital regulation, enable regulatory capture by authoritarian powers or bad corporate actors, and deepen the historical geopolitical power asymmetries between the global South and the global North. To prevent an unjust regulatory landscape where the global South's cultural and hermeneutic resources are absent, two principles for the Global Digital Compact to counter these prospective harms are proposed and discussed: (1) "recognitive consensus on key substantive benefits and harms" and (2) "procedural consensus on global coordination and essential standards."

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11573906PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2024.101078DOI Listing

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