Blog

The Sense and Nonsense of AI Ethics: a Whistle Stop Tour

The Fearless Scholar

2026

Themes: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Category: Blog

AI research has been energised since the unveiling of AlphaGo in 2016 and ChatGPT in 2022, demonstrating capabilities well beyond public and even expert expectations. It also has acquired a chaperone, a growing cottage industry of AI ethics to describe, diagnose, and ultimately remedy its perceived potential harms. There is no legal demand to be ethical, and no-one can force you to be ethical, so there is a limit to the number of harms it can prevent. The result is a crowded field with a confusion of non-problems, non-serious problems, non-specific problems and the real deal.

Five AI management strategies—and how they could shape the future

Atlantic Council GeoTech Center AI Connect II

2025

Co-authors: Wendy Hall

Themes: Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Category: Blog, Open access

The AI governance regime is evolving, and fortunately it is focused on predictable or evident risks, not speculative existential threats. Governments can legislate, and some have. New institutions, such as the EU’s AI Office and Britain’s AI Safety Institute, have emerged. Supranational groupings foster cooperation and standards, such as the United Nations AI Advisory Body, or the Group of Seven’s Hiroshima Process, and alongside these has been a tsunami of summitry and experience sharing. The combination of government regulation, global policy frameworks, research and testing infrastructure, and best practices will gradually coalesce into a recognizable AI governance regime with established norms and shared principles. In this shuffle, we see the repurposing of the ideal types of governance of the O’Hara/Hall Four Internets framework as governance strategies in the AI context, which we term Artificial Intelligence Management Strategies, or AIMS.