Transitioning from the days when the world was talking about framing laws for AI, a new paradigm has emerged with AI writing laws for humans. United Arab Emirates (UAE) has announced that it will use the power of AI to write the country’s laws.
As the first nation to take this leap of faith, UAE approved the Regulatory Intelligence Office to help with the process of writing new local and federal laws, reviewing them and amending existing legislations. The office will also be responsible for implementing, collaborating and designing the AI’s regulatory system, in an endeavour to streamline the legislative process by enabling digitization in the Gulf nation. And it is not just a small bunch of laws that AI will write for UAE. If some sources are to be believed, AI will write laws, judicial rulings, public services and executive procedures. The new legislative system empowered by AI is expected to make the process of lawmaking faster and precise, while also bringing down government’s cost of making and implementing laws.
UAE’s commitment to leveraging AI for public services had always been evident. In 2017, UAE had appointed its first AI minister, Omar Sultan al-Olama, shortly after the launch of UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence. With the new AI system in place for writing laws, the government officials are expecting lawmaking to speed up by 70%, while getting regular updates to current legislations from the AI system. AI can also analyze legal data, case laws, and societal impact of laws to propose amendments in real-time. This move to make AI a co-legislator has not been witnessed so far, and places UAE as the pioneer in using AI for predicting legal reforms based on socioeconomic trends, legal precedents and public service data.
Questions about requirement of human oversight still linger, though UAE is focusing big time on regulatory innovation and digital governance. The proactiveness of UAE to experiment with AI at scale for lawmaking shows its ambition to be a leader in AI space and sets a powerful precedent for other countries dabbling with AI in several sectors.
From a business perspective, having AI to quickly make and amend laws may be met with mixed emotions. While businesses may prefer the agility in legislative environment and may also appreciate the laws that better match the economic realities of the nation, unpredictable changes in laws and regulations can keep them on their toes all the time, which businesses may not prefer from a financial stability standpoint. Moreover, if laws are being made by AI based on the database of old laws, then the biases inherent in the old regulations may creep into the new ones as well. The citizens and enterprises may demand more transparency into the working of the AI lawmaker, and any attempt to quell the demand may lead to resentment towards the AI system.
UAE has certainly set a strong precedent for the global community, yet it needs to emphasize on human oversight in lawmaking and must combine multiple methods to manage the complexities of legislative drafting, socioeconomic modelling and ethical assessment of the AI-made laws.
