Ideas on Optimizing the Future Soft Law Governance of AI

This double special issue (with the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, December 2021) is dedicated to examining the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) through soft law. These programs are characterized by the creation of substantive expectations that are not directly enforced by government [1], [2]. The papers herein were selected from a project funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and administered by Arizona State University. Through this initiative, academics and representatives from the private and non-profit sector were invited to a series of workshops.The first workshop took place in Washington D.C. on January 9, 2020, where individuals participated in a roundtable discussion on special topics related to “AI Governance and Soft Law,” and were then asked to submit papers for initial review on a number of theoretical and applied areas. A second workshop was held virtually on October 9, 2020, providing a forum for the initial presentation of preliminary papers and feedback. A number of these papers were further developed and selected for peer review and a sub-selection made it into the final double special issue.The aim of the workshops was to explore ideas on how to improve the trustworthiness and effectiveness of soft law in an effort to maximize future benefits and minimize the drawbacks of AI methods and applications. In essence, they asked how could we harness the power of AI, sooner rather than later, via the adoption of soft law. This collection demonstrates the breadth and depth of nascent scholarship in the field. In fact, we believe these are the first special issues ever published in the area of AI Governance and Soft Law with the added importance of being released within a technical communications journal