Technology Governance Quotes

We are steering a course between a kind of computer age Scylla and Charybdis—between the shoals of suffocating regulation on the one side and the rocks of unfettered monopolies on the other.

Each of us has a vital role to play in building a world in which the government and technology serve the world's people and not the other way around.

The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come not from the technology but from the human institutions that govern how we use it.

We are bringing technology into governance in a very big way. This is making governance easy, effective, economic and transparent.

Technology is amoral, but it requires humanistic values to steer it in a way that's empowering, and not detrimental to social progress. It's up to us to maximize the good and minimize the bad.

Society will decide after the technology is created what we will and won't accept.

If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.

Technology could benefit or hurt people, so the usage of tech is the responsibility of humanity as a whole, not just the discoverer. I am a person before I'm an AI technologist.

Society is now at a crucial juncture in determining how to deploy AI-based technologies in ways that promote rather than hinder democratic values such as freedom, equality, and transparency.

Faced with the profound changes that AI technologies can produce, pressure for "more" and "tougher" regulation is inevitable. Misunderstanding about what AI is and is not, especially against a background of scare-mongering, could fuel opposition to technologies that could benefit everyone. This would be a tragic mistake. Regulation that stifles innovation, or relocates it to other jurisdictions, would be similarly counterproductive.

If I were Mark Zuckerberg or any of these guys, I would say, "My God. How does the world expect us to deal with this?" I mean, it's too big a responsibility; I think they're going to welcome this. They'll maybe keep it in the private sector, but they'll welcome some form of regulatory operation because they've been so successful that they are a global, public good. Everyone needs them.

I am part of the World Economic Forum Global Council on Robotics and AI, and we spend a fair amount of our time together as a group discussing ethics, best practices, and the like.

What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.

Often we need to use policy to level the playing field, or to be sure that a technology is managed in a responsible way.

Technologists provide tools that can improve people's lives. But I want to be clear that I don't think technology by itself improves people's lives, since often I'm criticized for being too pro-technology. Unless there's commensurate ethical and moral improvements to go along with it, it's for naught.

In a company where tech decisions were still ultracentralized, the repercussions of a distracted CEO had to be damaging.

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

The amount of money and industrial energy that has been put into accelerating AI code has meant that there hasn't been as much energy put into thinking about social, economic, ethical frameworks for these systems. We think there's a very urgent need for this to happen faster.

The Chinese government learnt how to manage the Internet from Western developed countries; we have not learnt enough yet.

Now that corporations dominate society and write the laws, each advance or change in technology is an opening for them to further restrict or mistreat its users.

Can companies just claim a total lack of political responsibility in how their technology is used in all instances? It's something that companies should be thinking about when they sell their technologies around the world.

It is only by the rational use of technology; to control and guide what technology is doing; that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desirable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

My own view is that the Internet should be run by technologists and engineers and business people, not by lawyers and bureaucrats here in the nation's capital.

It is time to stop debating whether the Internet is an effective tool for political expression and instead to address the much more urgent question of how digital technology can be structured, governed, and used to maximize the good and minimize the evil.

Technologies are political; what technologies finally appear as is not something decided in a laboratory.