NHNAI white paper: Societal exploration of humanism at the service of AI ethics and governance
Humanity is confronted with major challenges including climate change, inequalities, geostrategic tensions, weakening of democratic political organizations (notably with acute questions about the equilibrium between public and private powers as well as about collective intelligence and the threat of post-truth). Moreover, these multiple challenges all occur at the same time and with very rapid and brutal dynamics. As illustrated with the well-known analogy with the pharmakon, AI has considerable potential either to support mitigating these challenges or to amplify them.
The current era of AI—driven by advances like deep learning and Large Language Models (LLMs)—is marked by frenetic development and intense global competition. This rush is fueled by the perception of AI as a primary economic driver, leading to a “tyranny of tardiness” where attempts at regulation are protested as economic suicide. This hectic, market-driven environment, coupled with growing power asymmetries favoring tech giants who often adhere to techno-solutionist ideologies, makes ethical AI development extremely challenging.
The NHNAI project builds upon the core idea that, to move beyond this uncritical embrace of technology and put AI genuinely at the service of humanity, collective and intense effort of ethical capacity-building must be conducted to empower the individual and collective discernment and contribute to a strong horizontal and bottom-up support to the democratic governance of AI. Merely pointing out power imbalances isn’t enough. They must be confronted. But we believe that adequately orientating the development and use of AI is the responsibility of all concerned persons. In fact, power asymmetries are not the sole obstacle on the road of robust democratic governance of AI. Another challenge is to be able to set goals and purposes to AI. This is a decisive collective responsibility. What are the society project AI should serve? What are the visions of human nature, development and flourishing that will operate in the background?
The present white-paper results from NHNAI network’s effort to contribute to this necessary collective endeavor of discernment. It proposes several recommendations emitted by the academic experts of the network (notably based on the various discussions in the nine countries that participated in the first 2022-2025 phase). Recommendations are divided into three main components: 1) recommendations for the organization of collective reflection to build strong support to democratic governance of AI, 2) recommendations on basic elements of understanding of AI as well as of what it means to be human (elements without which collective discussions could be impaired), 3) recommendations on important topics that should be explored in collective exploration.
Before proposing a detailed analysis that deploys the full content of NHNAI recommendations, the document starts with an executive summary with the recommendations presented in a condensed form. The reader can either consult this summary and refer occasionally to the detailed analysis for more details, or directly begin with the detailed analysis.
This document constitutes a first version elaborated by NHNAI coordination team thanks to the direct the support and inputs of NHNAI partners. It is now published and opened for comments and reactions. Feedback will lead to the development of a second updated version.
