The Future Society is organizing the second edition of the Global Governance of AI Roundtable (GGAR) under the auspices of the United Arabic Emirates (UAE) State Minister for Artificial Intelligence on February 10th, 2019. Held yearly in Dubai on the occasion of the World Government Summit, GGAR is an international multi-stakeholder forum that brings together a diverse community of 250 global experts and practitioners from government, business, academia, international organizations, and civil society.

GGAR has been envisioned and designed as a unique collective intelligence exercise to discuss and help shape global, but culturally adaptable, norms for the governance of artificial intelligence.

Building upon the first edition of GGAR (held in February 2018), the 2019 edition began in August with an intensive six-months preparation and curation period. The community of participants was brought together through regular video conferences with the objective of shaping the 2019 agenda and driving the research effort managed in parallel by our team of AI Policy Researchers. This led to the publication of 14 background research papers on different topics ranging from agile governance, cybersecurity, geopolitics, explainability, international development, sustainability, and more. These research papers were informed by the organization of almost 90 expert calls, which also helped architect the agenda for the GGAR day with 4 working sessions and 47 subcommittees. This combined community building, research, and agenda-setting effort was done in partnership with a host of prestigious international organizations including the OECD, UNESCO, IEEE, the Council on Extended Intelligence, and the Global Data Commons Task Force.

GGAR will culminate into a one-day conference held in Dubai on the first day of the 2019 World Government Summit (February 10). The conference is designed as a prolongation of the collective intelligence effort initiated during preparation. It has no panels, no keynotes; only curated breakout sessions to maximize productivity and outcomes.

The insights and recommendations are captured into a comprehensive report, which includes an action-oriented summary for policymakers – see The Report of the 2018 edition. Aiming both at producing high impact recommendations and AI policy community building, GGAR is an exceptional community-building effort around the governance of AI, gathering a multidisciplinary range of experts that coordinate to maximize the benefits of AI deployment while minimizing its downside risks in the short and long terms.