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The United Arab Emirates aim to use AI to help write new legislation and examine and modify existing laws, in the most radical attempt in the Gulf State to exploit a technology in which it has paid billions.
The plan for what the state media called the “regulations led by AI” go further than anything that is seen elsewhere, said the IA researchers, while noting that the details were rare. Other governments are trying to use AI to become more effective, to summarize bills to improve the provision of public services, but not to actively suggest changes to current laws by crunching the government and legal data.
“This new legislative system, propelled by artificial intelligence, will change the way we create laws, making the process faster and more precise,” said Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the sovereign of Dubai and Water Vice-President, quoted by the state media.
The ministers approved last week the creation of a new cabinet unit, the regulatory intelligence office, to supervise the legislative push of the AI.
Rony Medaglia, professor at the Copenhagen Business School, said that the water seemed to have an “underlying ambition to transform AI into a sort of co-legislator”, and described the plan as “very daring”.
Abu Dhabi bet a lot on the AI and opened a dedicated investment vehicle last year, MGX, which supported a blackrock infrastructure fund of $ 30 billion among other investments. MGX also added an AI observer to his own board.
Water predicts to use AI to follow how the laws affect the country’s population and economy by creating a massive database of federal and local laws, as well as public sector data such as judicial judgments and government services.
The AI ”will regularly suggest updates to our legislation,” said Sheikh Mohammad, according to the state media. The government expects the AI to accelerate the legislation of 70%, according to the reading of the meeting of the cabinet.
But the researchers noted that he could face many challenges and traps. These range from AI becoming impenetrable to its users, to bias caused by its training data and its questions about the question of whether the AI even interprets laws in the same way as humans.
Although the AI models are impressive, “they continue to hallucinate [and] Having reliability problems and robustness problems, “warned Vincent Straub, researcher at the University of Oxford.” We cannot trust them. “”
Water plans are particularly new because they include the use of AI to anticipate the legal changes that may be necessary, said Straub. They could potentially also save on costs – governments often pay law firms to examine legislation.
“It seems that they go further … from the visualization of AI as, let’s say, as an assistant, a tool that can help and categorize and write, to the one who can really predict and anticipate,” said Straub.
Keegan McBride, lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute, said that autocratic water had “easier time” to adopt a radical government digitization than many democratic nations. “They are able to move quickly. They can somehow experience with things. ”
There are dozens of small ways whose governments use AI in legislation, said McBride, but he had not seen a similar plan in other countries. “In terms of ambition, [the UAE are] Just there near the summit, “said McBride.
It is not known what system of AI the government will use, and the experts said that it might need to combine more than one.
But the creation of railings for AI and human supervision would be crucial, researchers said.
The AI could offer something “really, really bizarre” which “makes sense for a machine”, but “can absolutely have a sense to really implement it for real in a human society,” said Marina de Vos, a computer scientist from Bath University.
