Bronwyn Howell: The Precautionary Principle, Safety Regulation, and AI: This Time, It Really Is Different

Key Points

• Generative pretrained transformers (GPTs)—such as large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama—come from a different computing paradigm than do traditional “big data” artificial intelligence models.
• Traditional risk-management frameworks developed from the precautionary principle to address the risks of big data AI models (which current AI regulations are based on) are not well suited to manage GPT risks.
• Using case-based regulation for specific applications rather than generic, overarching regulation is likely a more effective way to manage GPT AI risks.

Bronwyn Howell: Compulsory contact-tracing apps - the case of New Zealand

First published HERE by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy think tank, on August 25, 2021.

New Zealand, under the leadership of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, has received considerable international kudos for its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

With an elimination strategy best articulated as “zero tolerance of community transmission,” the country to date has exhibited one of the world’s lowest infection and death rates. 

By August 22, it had recorded 24 deaths (0.48 per 100,000 people) — notably few compared to the United States’ 628,503 deaths (191.5 per 100,000 people). Even the best-performing US state in this statistic, Hawaii (to which New Zealand, as a small Pacific nation, could be comparable), has a death rate of 39 per 100,000 people.

The core of New Zealand’s COVID-19 strategy is twofold.

First is a draconian border closure where entry is strictly controlled. 

Bronwyn Howell: Can international social media censorship succeed?

Twenty four years ago, New Zealand’s Prime Minister David Lange strode the world stage as the symbolic face of the international antinuclear movement. 

In 2019, his political descendent Jacinda Ardern now similarly stands, alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, as the face of a new international moral campaign against the use of social media to organize and promote terrorism and violent extremism. 

The pair will host a summit of global leaders and tech industry executives on May 15 seeking a pledge to eliminate (i.e., censor) terrorist and violent extremist content on social media platforms.