Lebanon Minister urges stronger AI regulation from governments

Kamal Shehadi, Lebanon’s Minister of Technology and AI, expressed his opinion on the need for AI framework policies to adapt to the rapidly evolving technology, as reported by The National on 14th October.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic of recent innovation, with the technology’s ability to process and generate large amounts of information; provide personalised assistance to people; and even generate art from mere text inputs.
The rising cultural prominence of AI in day-to-day life has led to increasing concerns from governments and companies in regulating the powerful technology. With AI applications now being entrenched in sectors such as healthcare, cybersecurity and social policy, as well as having the power to manipulate videos and images to growing degrees of realism, the need to make sure the technology cannot be misused has reached a heightened level of importance.
AI companies have recently worked towards greater implementation in the Middle East, with Arabic being introduced as language for google’s AI search.
Lebanon’s Minister of Technology and AI, Kamal Shehadi, was interviewed at this year’s Gitex Global technology conference in Dubai. At the conference, he was said to have emphasised the need for governments to join forces with the private sector in order to better regulate how the technology is implemented.
“It starts by the government being the regulator,” Shehadi said. “This includes having… sandboxes, where they allow the particular line of business to develop and see how it works out then identify those areas that require regulatory invervention.”
Reportedly, Shehadi both warned of AI’s potential for misuse, but also highlighted the transformative prospects of the technology: “In many industries… it would required the government to also step in and either be a catalyst or even invest to get this started.”
He was also claimed to have emphasised the need to implement regulatory frameworks which are both flexible and adaptive. Admitting to the futility of being able to consistently create policies that keep up with the current abilities and limitations of AI, he instead proposed a regulatory system that can be easily refashioned alongside changes to AI.
Ultimately, the government’s role in both contributing to and governing AI was said to have been essential to the development of smaller nations such as Lebanon. Shehadi sees AI as a salient investment in the upcoming regionala and global value chain.
With companies that utilise AI seeing themselves as key figures in building their own regulation frameworks and policies, Shehadi’s statements at Gitex forward discussion into how government’s can not only collaborate with the private sector to ensure the technology doesn’t get out of hand, but also set standards into responsible AI use.
The National, Maghrebi.org
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