Arthur D. Sidney | Substack
Arthur D. Sidney
Arthur D. Sidney is an attorney and policy strategist focused on AI governance, tech policy, procurement risk, and AI in Africa. Founder of The Sidney Group, he has advised tech clients, taught law and policy, testified, and published widely.
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Grateful to see this conversation translated and shared with a wider audience.
The point I keep coming back to is simple: AI governance is not only about building systems. It is about building the institutional capacity to govern them.
That includes access, infrastructure, sovereignty, data rights, accountability, and authority.
Africa’s AI…
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[linkedin.com\n\nBuilding the Infrastructure of Tomorrow’s Society | Translated\n\nThe tools we’re building to govern AI are already shaped by AI itself. Who sets the terms, and why, is the question this issue of Futures in Context sits with. Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, former member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on AI, ma…\n\n
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Honored to be included in this issue of Futures in Context alongside Vilas Dhar and Michael Santoro.
My argument was simple: AI governance cannot stop at frameworks on paper or a human somewhere in the loop.
The real question is who has the authority to challenge, override, or stop a system once it is deployed.
Who can stop the machine?
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All day, people are bombarded with AI governance discussions. It is on social media, LinkedIn, Substack, Reddit, Discord, podcasts, and virtually everywhere else.
As AI Governance Lead ⚡ once observed, before finishing her morning coffee she had already consumed more AI governance content than anyone should have to process that early in the day.
That raises …
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One of the first pieces I published on this Substack appeared when there was almost no audience.
The argument was simple:
There is no single AI agency.
That is not necessarily a failure. It is the reality of how AI governance is emerging.
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Thomas, I appreciate this. I think you’re right that distributed governance cannot mean weak governance.
My point is that procurement, standards, and sector-specific regulators are already exercising real power, often before the public debate catches up.
That makes the harder question even more important: how do we make public obligations…
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I think you’re exactly right that there’s no “FDA for AI” coming, and that real power is sitting in procurement, standards, and sectoral regulators rather than in some future super agency.
However, I believe that people calling for an “FDA for AI” aren’t actually begging for another bloated, bumbling bureaucracy staffed by Silicon Valley’…
Some of my earlier AI governance pieces were written before this Substack had much of a following.
Looking back, the core questions still hold:
Who owns an AI decision?
Who controls AI systems after deployment?
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Some of my earlier AI governance pieces were written before this Substack had much of a following.
Looking back, the core questions still hold:
Who owns an AI decision?
Who controls AI systems after deployment?
Is procurement quietly becoming AI governance?
What happens when there is no single AI agency?
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Arthur D. SidneyJun 15