Using Experience Smartly to Ensure a Better Future: How the Hard-Earned Lessons of History Should Shape The External and Internal Governance of Corporate Use of Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Artificial intelligence or “AI” has transformative potential. But that reality should not obscure the fact that our society has longstanding experience with the corporate development of novel technologies that pose the simultaneous potential to better human lives and to create massive harm. This article, prepared for the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Corporate Law and for the Rome Conference on AI, Ethics, and the Future of Corporate Governance, looks backward at the prior experience with corporate profit-seeking through the development and use of transformative technologies to suggest policy measures that might help ensure that the benefits of AI’s development by for-profit business entities to society far exceed its downside.

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, board of directors, corporate governance reform, corporate law, corporate political spending, corporate responsibility, externality regulation, independent directors, international regulation, limited liability, residual claimant theory

JEL Classification: G32, G34, K13 K20, K22, K33, M12, M14