The Historical Model of AI Regulation and Cooperation

Lilian Coral, vice president of New America’s technology and democracy programs and head of the Open Technology Institute, wrote an article published in Stanford Social Innovation Review what the Human Genome Project can teach us about using revolutionary technology in the public interest — and why nuclear weapons are a counterproductive analogy.

Rather than hoarding access to AI and focusing solely on risk mitigation, universities, national labs, and industries around the world need to work together to advance the benefits of this technology. This may seem like an overly optimistic, impossible task, but it wasn’t long ago that humanity successfully realized such cooperation and advanced the benefits of another controversial technology: genetic sequencing. In 1990, governments around the world, led by the United States, began a 13-year effort to map human DNA through the Human Genome Project (HGP). I believe we can once again work together to ensure that AI advances help humanity thrive.