Artificial Diplomacy: A Guide for Public Officials to Conduct Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our contemporary society imposes historically unique challenges for humankind. Public officials around the world will have to adjust to the expected Artificial Intelligence (r)evolution. But how to conduct Artificial Intelligence entering our workforce, governance and society? This article attempts to give directions on the newest trend of Artificial Intelligence. Stateshuman and diplomates are invited to consider three major trends in the wake of the Artificial Intelligence (r)evolution: (1) Artificial Intelligence has gained citizenship as robots have become the first citizens in Saudi Arabia. With these ethical questions arise the question of a stratified citizenship. Robots and algorithms may only be citizens for their protection and upholding social norms towards human-like creatures but may not have full citizen privileges such as voting and holding a public office. (2) Big data revolutions coupled with computational power hold unprecedented opportunities for crowd understanding, trends prediction and civil control. Ethical boundaries may also include data breaches, privacy infringements and discrimination. Data protection through technological advancement, privacy attention through education as well as discrimination alleviation through taxation of data transfer are recommended. Within the European compound, a data freedom added to the four economic freedoms is argued. The contrast between utility of access to information and dignity in privacy is drawn in order to show differences in the American and the European regulatory approaches to handle big data. Austria, recently mentioned in the New York Times as for spearheading taxing data and information flows, currently sets international standards on handling big data. Ground-breaking work of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger on the right to delete as well as Maximilian Schrems privacy advocacy paving the way for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are given but also potential downsides of these trends mentioned. (3) Lastly, data is presented in order to make the case that the Artificial Intelligence revolution disrupting standard economic growth has already started. The divide between skill-based and unskilled-labor has never been as wide as before and 5G entering the stage is prospected to create Artificial technology hubs that further shun low-income territories from economic luxuries around the world. Paying attention to the newest trend of slowbalisation, the slowing of traditional globalization economic landmarks such as trade of goods and foreign direct investments, the market disruption will be argued to be met best by embracing new technologies while taxing revenues gained through data and the Artificial Intelligence workforce. Taxation revenues will allow the leeway to offset losses and the social costs of market distortions caused by robots and algorithms taking over in the marketplace. The European Union model of putting a social face on capitalism will be discussed to round up the need for attention to ethics to guide the currently ongoing Artificial Intelligence (r)evolution. Diplomats play a leading role in creative advocacy and humanness in service and client-relationship skills in a time of unprecedented change to artificiality.