CONCEPT
Magna Carta for the Digital Age
Giddens's 2018 proposal — articulated in the Washington Post and in his service on the House of Lords AI Committee — for a civilizational charter governing the new kings of the digital era, the large technology companies whose power exceeds any single nation's regulatory capacity.
In his April 2018 Washington Post essay, Giddens proposed that AI governance required a charter comparable in ambition to the Magna Carta — a foundational document constraining the sovereigns of the digital era, which he identified as the large technology companies. The proposal combined three principles: that AI should be developed for the common good, that it should operate on principles of intelligibility and fairness, and that it should never be given autonomous power to hurt, destroy, or deceive. The proposal has been largely overtaken by the pace of technological development — a fact that confirms rather than refutes Giddens's underlying structural analysis of temporal mismatch.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay appeared while Giddens was serving on the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, which had interviewed sixty experts and 280 witnesses over nine months