On December 6th and 7th, the third edition of The Athens Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law  convened and facilitated a participative dialogue amongst key stakeholders on international AI policy developments and salient AI standardization and benchmarking initiatives in the United States, Europe, and beyond.The 2021 Athens Roundtable clearly surfaced the fact that governing the rise of AI for the benefit of humanity will require developing smart cocktails of self, soft and hard regulatory mechanisms. The smarter these are, the better off we can collectively capture AI’s upsides and minimize the downsides. Solid international cooperation on this is needed to ensure we defend and uphold the best from our democratic values, starting with the rule of law which really is its bedrock.

You can easily access the recordings here, and a list of links to publications shared by the community here.

The 2021 Athens Roundtable is organized by The Future Society and ELONTech and co-hosted with UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament’s Panel on the Future of Science and Technology (STOA), IEEE SA, the Center on Civil Justice at the NYU School of Law, and The National Judicial College, among other prominent institutions.

As The Future Society’s flagship event, we are delighted to have seen over 1600 participants join a diverse line-up of 55 experts in a forward-looking dialogue on how to uphold the rule of law in the age of AI.

The full 2021 Athens Roundtable agenda can be viewed here.

Amongst others, highlights from the 2021 Athens Roundtable include:

• the launch, under the umbrella of The Athens Roundtable, of a transatlantic Working Group on Interoperable Benchmarking of AI Systems. Participating institutions include US NIST, France’s Laboratoire National d’Essais, Greece’s NCSR Demokritos, CEN-CENELEC, and IEEE-SA.
• the launch of a global online course on Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law aiming to build AI literacy across judicial operators and equip them with capacities to navigate complex technology such as AI
• a lively discussion on the recent launch of: A Manifesto In Defence of Democracy and the Rule of Law in the Age of “Artificial Intelligence”
• a thought-provoking fireside chat calling for global engagement and participation in co-shaping responsible AI

You can easily access the recordings here, and a list of links to publications shared by the community here.

Moving forward, we hope you join our activities on AI and the Rule of Law and the next editions of the Athens Roundtable. Over the next year, we plan to focus on:

• Practical pathways to safeguard human rights in the age of AI, including the need to build capacities of stakeholders worldwide
• International legislative and regulatory AI developments, as well as the incentive structures for their implementation
• AI standards and benchmarking, and their impact on industry, government, and society