AI Policies towards the AGI Challenge: An International Assessment

This work examines AI policies and AI legislation following a mixed research method that entails qualitative and quantitative analyses of national and international AI policy official documents, in combination with scientometric analyses of the scientific production. As concerns the former, this research covers countries from all continents (Australia, Canada, China, India, Israel, Japan, Norway, Russia, South Africa, UK, USA) and the EU. As for the latter, the scientometric research was carried out at a global scale. According to the results, the countries do not share the same academic interest in this important matter, neither their formal AI policy documents cover the same AI-related issues with the same emphasis. This analysis leads to the identification of gaps and common elements among national policies (i.e. emphasis on risks, safety) that are of interest to researchers, policymakers, governments, institutions and stakeholders. While there are significant differences among priorities towards AI, among the key findings of this research are the following: a) the most important words in the AI policy documents that have been examined are "risks", "safety" and "ethics"; b) the emerging major issue of Artificial General Intelligence is not addressed in anyone of the official AI documents of the countries previously mentioned; c) there are significant differences in the geographical distributions of both the scientific production and the policy-making processes, with a handful of countries leading the way in both AI law and AGI. Yet, it is encouraging that the growth in the scientific literature about AI legislation grows faster than that related to AGI and so there is hope that countries and international institutions will be able to cope with the rise of AGI in terms of policy-making and legislation.