AI doesn’t have a boss. It doesn’t really care about rules. And most of us don’t have any say over what it will do next.

Yet the technology is all around us, firmly established in workplaces, financial systems, healthcare and defence. So maybe it needs someone to keep an eye on its progress and set some boundaries.

The UN certainly thinks so, and recently decided to set up an independent panel to monitor AI’s future development. It seems like a sensible move, but this attempt to create a successful forum for “rigorous, independent scientific insight” also highlights the inherent difficulties of governing technology on a global scale.

For a start, the US, which dominates AI development, doesn’t want anything to do with the panel. It voted against the UN’s idea (so did Paraguay), calling it “significant overreach”.

But the UN argues that AI affects everyone, and requires some global coordination. UN secretary-general António Guterres has described the new panel as the first “fully independent scientific body dedicated to helping close the AI knowledge gap and assess the real impacts of AI”.

As with some of the UN’s other forums, like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the International Atomic Energy Agency, the AI panel would not write the laws, but would help establish common ground rules and standards that everyone can agree on.

AI is a different beast though. Unlike........

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