Thank you for this thoughtful piece. Your distinction between data, inference, and learning gave me a new way of thinking about AI governance. It highlights that governing information alone is no longer sufficient if the conclusions drawn from it can profoundly affect people’s lives.
One thought it inspired is that governance may also need a mechanism for meaningful, real-time human participation. In your healthcare example, a family facing a life-threatening diagnosis cannot wait months or years for policy to catch up. Some decisions require timely avenues for review, contestability, and accountability because human lives continue moving while institutions deliberate.
If data is what we give, inference is what the system concludes, and learning is what the system retains, then perhaps participation is what allows society to continually shape the objectives and boundaries within which those systems operate. Governance becomes not only a matter of oversight, but of preserving the ability for people to respond as new circumstances emerge.
Thank you again for sharing your work. I appreciate how you’ve framed these issues in human terms rather than purely technical ones, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
Thank you for this very comprehensive comment. We are all affected by AI. First we need to know the stakes. Then, we need to know how it could affect us all. Then we need to see where is our agency in this. Technology should be at the service of humans and not the other way around. That is why it is important put governance systems in place to make sure we preserve our agency. We all have a role to play. You can get access to the full report here: https://blogs.inspire-aspire.net/p/digital-sovereignty-in-the-cognitive.
Thank you for this thoughtful piece. Your distinction between data, inference, and learning gave me a new way of thinking about AI governance. It highlights that governing information alone is no longer sufficient if the conclusions drawn from it can profoundly affect people’s lives.
One thought it inspired is that governance may also need a mechanism for meaningful, real-time human participation. In your healthcare example, a family facing a life-threatening diagnosis cannot wait months or years for policy to catch up. Some decisions require timely avenues for review, contestability, and accountability because human lives continue moving while institutions deliberate.
If data is what we give, inference is what the system concludes, and learning is what the system retains, then perhaps participation is what allows society to continually shape the objectives and boundaries within which those systems operate. Governance becomes not only a matter of oversight, but of preserving the ability for people to respond as new circumstances emerge.
Thank you again for sharing your work. I appreciate how you’ve framed these issues in human terms rather than purely technical ones, and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.
Thank you for this very comprehensive comment. We are all affected by AI. First we need to know the stakes. Then, we need to know how it could affect us all. Then we need to see where is our agency in this. Technology should be at the service of humans and not the other way around. That is why it is important put governance systems in place to make sure we preserve our agency. We all have a role to play. You can get access to the full report here: https://blogs.inspire-aspire.net/p/digital-sovereignty-in-the-cognitive.