Governing What? What Is AI?

What is it about?

Chapter One of Governing Artificial Intelligence traces the historical and conceptual evolution of AI from its roots in early communication theory and the pioneering work of figures like Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and Vannevar Bush to the breakthroughs of Deep Blue, AlphaGo, and modern machine learning. It emphasizes that AI, coined as a term in 1956, has largely advanced through mimicry and probabilistic modeling rather than true creativity or sentience, despite public misconceptions fueled by tools like ChatGPT. The chapter highlights both the promise and limitations of AI: while it can accelerate discovery and offer novel combinations of existing knowledge, it remains a system of projections and associations, prone to errors and hallucinations. The authors stress that the mystification of AI masks its true nature as a human-directed tool, raising challenges for governance as policymakers often misunderstand its scope and risks, while industry narratives can obscure responsibility for how AI is applied.

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