Dear Friends,
Last week the Boston Global Forum (BGF) and the World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid (WLA-CdM) organized a policy lab on Translatlantic Approaches to Digital Governance: Social Contract for the AI Age. The event featured several panels on the growing importance of AI and digital policy. It is clear that the process of “digitalization” is accelerating. Countries are now confronting new challenges, as well as new opportunities.
Advances in AI raise policy issues that must be assessed. We must now focus through dialogue, tolerance, learning and understanding on key principles and practices for an agreement among members of society for shared social benefit. And we believe it is vitally important that democratic leaders make clear our support for fundamental rights and the rule of law in this Age of AI. We want to ensure that AI supports sustainable development, inclusion, fairness and accountability.
Our next step is to build public support for the Social Contract for the Age of AI. This global declaration sets out a human-centric approach for the governance of AI. The Social Contract is the outcome of a collaboration over the last several years between the BGF and the CdM/WLA.
We are asking you to join us, as signatories, in support of this initiative. Over the next several months, we will reach out to innovators, thinkers, advocates, and other world leaders. Our aim is to build support for the Social Contract and to educate the public about the many issues we will confront in the years ahead. We are also developing monitoring mechanisms so that we can begin to assess national progress toward the goals that we have set out.
You will find more information about the Social Contract for the Age of AI here. If you would like to endorse, please contact Tuan Nguyen, director of the Michael Dukakis Institute.
Thank you for your continued interest in this work.
Sincerely,
Governor Michael Dukakis, Boston Global Forum, and
President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Latvia and World Leadership Alliance-Club de Madrid
