Artificial Intelligence and Parliamentary Diplomacy
Author: Author: Moises Benamor, Chief of Representative Institutions at the Organisation of American States (OAS). Written on September, 2024
This publication is part of the book “Artificial Intelligence in Legislative Services: Principles for Effective Implementation”. To download the entire book, use the button below:
As is widely known, the term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956 by John McCarthy, an American mathematician, who defined it as “the science and engineering of creating intelligent machines, especially those programmed by intelligent computing.”
Three key aspects of this definition are: (i) it improves competitiveness; (ii) it fosters innovation; and (iii) it develops new skills. These aspects are currently reflected in various technologies, which provide numerous social and economic benefits across a wide range of areas. However, we must also recognise that they bring with them threats and risks that are affecting individuals, businesses, and governments.
For these reasons, parliaments must permanently include in their legislative agendas issues related to the development, implementation, and use of generative and other emerging technologies, highlighting key aspects such as:
Development and implementation in line with international instruments that promote, protect, and guarantee Human Rights;
The promotion of innovation in a safe, transparent, and reliable legal environment;
Algorithmic governance, which prioritises the democratic value of data; and
Alignment with laws that protect privacy and personal data, as well as strengthening technology with social impact.
With the aim of achieving these goals, the OAS, through an exercise in parliamentary diplomacy, developed 10 AI principles, which from an inclusive perspective establish the necessary minimums to maximise the benefits of this technological tool, as well as to address the risks it poses.
Each of these guiding principles encourages both parliamentarians and their technical teams to create legal instruments and technological tools that modernise their parliamentary processes and procedures, as well as the necessary regulatory frameworks. In each of these efforts, priority should be given to democratic values and practices, such as integrity, transparency, and ethics. The guiding principles for AI in parliaments are as follows:
Ensure that AI is used to enhance human development.
The user should be the primary beneficiary of AI, avoiding biases in algorithms so that there are no patterns of discrimination or stigmatisation.
Promote the use of AI to facilitate accessibility and inclusion for people with diverse functional abilities.
Set limits on the use of AI according to its function, particularly for minors and individuals with cognitive limitations.
Ensure that control is applied to services offered through AI.
Properly identify products and/or services generated by AI.
Ensure the governance and auditing of data and their sources, as well as the algorithms and products generated by AI.
Promote the registration of AI’s intellectual property to identify its creators and beneficiaries.
Prevent AI from being credited with producing products or services that were not generated by AI (AI washing).
Encourage education on AI to provide people with greater knowledge, critical vision, and improved social and emotional skills.
Moreover, to disseminate and reinforce these principles, it is essential to promote diplomacy, dialogue, and inter-parliamentary cooperation. Therefore, parliaments must equip both their parliamentarians and their staff with the skills and abilities necessary to adapt to this new global dynamic, which demands a greater commitment from legislative bodies to place technological governance and cyberspace at the core of parliamentary-political activity.
In the 21st century, parliamentary diplomacy not only involves promoting friendly relations between parliaments and parliamentarians, but also requires strengthening commitments to political representation, protecting the interests of their respective nations and citizens, as well as pursuing the negotiation and resolution of conflicts, and most notably, the exchange of information.
For all these reasons, it is important to highlight that another way to approach parliamentary diplomacy is to ensure it becomes a means to restore credibility, trust, and respect towards the legislative power, reclaiming its fundamental role in good governance and in strengthening the foreign policy of their respective countries.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), whose mission is “to promote policies that improve the economic and social well-being of people worldwide,” stated in 2019 in one of its recommendations that “AI is a general-purpose technology with the potential to improve human well-being, contribute to sustainable and positive global economic activity, increase innovation and productivity, and help tackle key global challenges, being implemented in many sectors, from manufacturing, finance, and transportation to healthcare and security.”
Using these ideas as a reference, it is necessary to highlight that the use of generative technologies such as AI in parliamentary diplomacy deserves to be the subject of study and analysis, particularly to address several areas of common interest, such as the economy, the fight against poverty, sustainable development, security, and especially democracy and human rights.
A concrete example of this would be the use of tools that automate the collection and identification of patterns and trends in large datasets from parliaments, which, while ensuring privacy and security, allow for the development of information repositories, legislative harmonisation projects, and oversight strategies.
Likewise, the use of AI could also be a key tool for promoting digital talent in the parliamentary field, as well as for fostering openness, transparency, information, and connection between parliament and citizens.
On another note, we must also recognise that AI is having a global impact on key sectors for development, such as education, healthcare, security, transportation, and finance, among others. However, it is also causing significant disruptions in political systems, driven by misinformation actions and strategies that have increased levels of political polarisation and confrontation, heightened social conflict, and undermined the quality of many electoral processes around the world.
For this reason, parliaments share a common challenge: to integrate themselves in the best possible way into an orderly, balanced, inclusive, and fair digital transition. AI is a key tool for rethinking this objective, as well as their relationships on the international stage, whether at the bilateral, regional, interregional, or multilateral level. The proper use of these new technologies will not only allow parliaments to understand the present challenges and future demands of digital democracy, but also to effectively address their shared responsibilities in representation, legislation, and oversight at both multilateral and national levels.
AI advances have already changed the way we conceive parliamentary and political work, thanks to the ability of various technological tools to automate legislative tasks. Although these have optimised and streamlined parliamentary processes and procedures in many parliaments around the world, there is still no shared common agenda to optimise resources and talents, nor to adequately recognise successful practices and lessons learned.
In this context, we must ensure that parliamentary diplomacy is not exempt from these trends, as it is the ideal exercise to ensure that both successes and failures are incorporated into effective inter-parliamentary collaboration, cooperation, and dialogue initiatives, thus fostering more coherent interaction between parliamentarians and between parliamentary officials and technicians.
Another interesting challenge to address through parliamentary diplomacy is the global effort to identify the scope, content, and impact of AI on state sovereignty. Issues such as data access, the value and exploitation of algorithms, fiscal and tax matters, and the regulation of new technologies are all highly relevant topics with significant potential for discussion within parliamentary diplomacy, particularly from a technical-political-legal perspective, involving active participation from key stakeholders such as the private sector, academia, and specialised social organisations.
A clear example of this is in the European Union, which introduced a regulation creating a regulatory body where companies and institutions using algorithms must register those algorithms. The body evaluates whether or not the algorithms are dangerous and determines the degree of danger they may pose in terms of their impact on society. This regulation is not without controversy, as some argue it conflicts with free trade agreements and other existing supranational agreements. As we can see, parliamentary diplomacy and AI still have a long way to go.