What is at stake in regulating AI in digital governance? As AI and digital technologies advance rapidly, governance frameworks struggle to keep pace with emerging applications and risks.

In this talk, Professor Matthew Liao, New York University, moderated by Professor Janina Dill, Blavatnik School of Government, will ask six questions to analyse governance frameworks: 1) What should be regulated (data, algorithms, sectors, or risk levels)? 2) Why regulate (ethics, legal compliance, market failures, or national interests)? 3) Who should regulate (industry, government, or public stakeholders)? 4) When should regulation occur? 5) Where should it take place (local, national, or international levels)? 6) How should regulation be enacted (hard versus soft regulation)? Professor Liao will compare the European Union's AI Act to US regulation, revealing key differences.

Matthew Liao

Matthew Liao is Arthur Zitrin Chair of Bioethics, Director of the Center for Bioethics, Professor of Global Public Health, and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University. He is the author or editor of The Right to Be Loved (Oxford University Press); Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press); Moral Brains: The Neuroscience of Morality (Oxford University Press); The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights (Oxford University Press); Current Controversies in Bioethics (Routledge), and over 70 articles in philosophy and bioethics. He has given TED and TEDx talks in New York and CERN, Switzerland, and he has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the BBC, Harper’s Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Scientific American and other media outlets.

From 2006 to 2009, Liao was the Deputy Director and James Martin Senior Research Fellow in the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He was the Harold T. Shapiro Research Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University in 2003–2004, and a Greenwall Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and a Visiting Researcher at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University from 2004–2006. Liao obtained his doctorate in philosophy from Oxford University and his AB from Princeton University. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Moral Philosophy, a peer-reviewed international journal of moral, political and legal philosophy.