How goes it Señor? Continuing to share material from talks I’ve given but haven’t necessarily published, here’s what I said at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz College last month. Titled “A Carative Approach to AI Governance”, it was a refinement of talks I’ve given over the last year. The word ‘carative’ is a contrast to the word ‘curative’ and is related to the holistic nature of nurses caring for patients as opposed to more pointed curing of patients that doctors are trained for. My earlier view on carative AI is in this blog post.
Positionality
I began with a positionality statement, highlighting:
1. Our par par nana (great great grandfather) Ishwar Das Varshnei being the first Indian to study at MIT in 1904-1905, taking glass manufacturing technology back to India, teaming up with Lokmanya Tilak to start the crowd-funded Paisa Fund Glass Works, and using its factory and school to fight for svarajya, a concept that not only included independence for India from the British, but also equality, liberty, and justice among the people.
2. Our baba (grandfather) Raj Kumar Varshney studying control engineering at Illinois and returning to India to apply the concepts to food production at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute. The institute’s founder Sam Higginbottom was an advisor to Mahatma Gandhi as he sought ways to reduce poverty.
3. My studying electrical engineering, working at a company with artificial intelligence as a focus, and trying to use that technology for equality and reducing poverty.
Further, I contrasted the morally-driven industrialist Henry Heinz (appropriate given the venue where I was speaking) and the muckraking investigative journalist Upton Sinclair in the early days of the processed food industry. I made the case that my worldview shaped by forefathers and foremothers is oriented towards that of Heinz. Heinz tried to work from the inside to improve things constructively while Sinclair worked from the outside to improve things by critically exposing ills.
Control Theory Perspective on AI Governance
Now to governance. A governor is a device to measure and regulate a machine. It is also known as a controller. Thus governance is the act or process of overseeing the control and direction of something. AI governance has lots of different definitions floating around these days, but they usually refer to responsible or trustworthy AI. The definitions may refer to laws and regulations, and may be quite philosophical. I recently heard 2023 predicted to be the “year of AI governance.” Interestingly, the etymological root for governance and cybernetics is the same Greek work kybernetes (cybernetics is an old word for AI-like things).
But instead of dwelling on laws, philosophy, or etymology for the time being, let’s come back to my engineering roots and look at a typical control system such as the one drawn below.
