Overcoming Barriers to Cross-Cultural Cooperation on AI ethics and governance

We suggest that academia has a particularly important role to play in supporting cross-cultural cooperation on AI ethics and governance. Academic communities are particularly well-suited to building greater mutual understanding between regions and cultures, due to their tradition of free-flowing, international, and intercultural exchange of ideas. We make a number of practical steps that academic institutions and individual researchers can take: including translation of key papers and reports; alternating the location of key conferences; and establishing exchange programmes. We also identify several promising research topics in AI ethics and governance that would be well-suited to international collaboration, such as conducting comparative foresight exercises exploring how different cultures perceive the future impact of AI on society.