Tech Explained: A People-Centered Justice Approach to Implementing AI Governance in Simple Terms

Global efforts to govern AI have expanded rapidly over the past few years. While top-down AI governance policy regimes have proliferated, less attention has been paid to the operationalization of these regimes at the local level. Ultimately, domestic legal systems, operating at national and local levels, will be the ones to implement AI governance priorities.

This paper provides a current state analysis of AI governance and how the justice sector can enhance its success. The authors couple secondary research and primary analysis of key governance processes with input from an array of experts in the public and private sectors, multilateralism, civil society, and academia to explore two critical questions:

1. What are the key multilateral activities, platforms, and convening spaces on emerging technology, AI governance, and social impact where people-centered justice is not currently present?
2. In what ways can people-centered justice offer value to these spaces?

This paper:

• Reviews the current AI governance landscape, including the geopolitics of emerging technology regulations. Within this review, they argue that access to justice will be impacted by many of these conditions.
• Considers the current implementation of AI governance in practice.
• Identifies ways the justice sector, with a particular focus on people-centered justice, can add value to administrative guidance, procurement, independent oversight, and meaningful access to remedy.
• Underscores the urgency of this moment to include access to justice in the AI governance agenda. This will require partnership between AI governance and justice experts examining the development, adoption, and promotion of responsible, rights-based, and ethical AI.
• Provides a series of recommendations for governments, international organizations, the private sector, civil society, and academia.