Governance of artificial intelligence
Open accessAbstract
The rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the intensification in the adoption of AI in domains such as autonomous vehicles, lethal weapon systems, robotics and alike pose serious challenges to governments as they must manage the scale and speed of socio-technical transitions occurring. While there is considerable literature emerging on various aspects of AI, governance of AI is a significantly underdeveloped area. The new applications of AI offer opportunities for increasing economic efficiency and quality of life, but they also generate unexpected and unintended consequences and pose new forms of risks that need to be addressed. To enhance the benefits from AI while minimising the adverse risks, governments worldwide need to understand better the scope and depth of the risks posed and develop regulatory and governance processes and structures to address these challenges. This introductory article unpacks AI and describes why the Governance of AI should be gaining far more attention given the myriad of challenges it presents. It then summarises the special issue articles and highlights their key contributions. This special issue introduces the multifaceted challenges of governance of AI, including emerging governance approaches to AI, policy capacity building, exploring legal and regulatory challenges of AI and Robotics, and outstanding issues and gaps that need attention. The special issue showcases the state-of-the-art in the governance of AI, aiming to enable researchers and practitioners to appreciate the challenges and complexities of AI governance and highlight future avenues for exploration.
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AI governance frameworks specifically designed for healthcare offer limited guidance on how to establish and operationalize AI governance in real-world settings.
“These frameworks offer limited guidance on how to establish and operationalize AI governance in real-world settings27.”
From Establishing organizational AI governance in healthcare: a case study in Canada (2025) · cites this paper as [27]
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“The governance of AI faces problems similar to that of any other emerging technology, which include information asymmetries, policy uncertainty, structural power dynamics, and policy errors (Taeihagh, 2021).”
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- Authors
- Taeihagh, A.
- Affiliations
- National University of Singapore (SG)
- Corresponding author
- Taeihagh, Araz
- ORCID
- Taeihagh, Araz
- Venue
- Policy and Society
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2021-04-03
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 137-157
- ISSN
- 1449-4035 (ISSN-L)
- 1839-3373
- OpenAlex
- W3166943242
- Cited by
- 562
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 156 · 2025: 180 · 2024: 131 · 2023: 56 · 2022: 32 · 2021: 7
- FWCI
- 70.64
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Policy and Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- National University of Singapore (submittedVersion)
- SSRN Electronic Journal (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- National University of Singapore
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Social Sciences › Law › Digitalization, Law, and Regulation
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems
- Keywords
- AI governance, AI regulation, AI policy, socio-technical transitions, AI risks, unintended consequences of AI, robotics regulation, policy capacity building, autonomous vehicles
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