Guardrails for Artificial General Intelligence: A strategic foresight approach to ethical AI Governance

The introduction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) brings new challenges to governance mechanisms, which ought to be able to strike a balance between innovation, moral mandates, and safety of a society. The paper discusses the importance of strategic foresight in the process of creating effective guardrails to AGI systems using contemporary literature on issues in AI governance, anticipatory governance regimes and complex adaptive system theory. We address these issues by conducting an analytical review of their regulation to date, and innovative governance models that have and are being developed, and propose an existent regulatory paradigm with the use of combined strategic forward-looking approaches to governance, especially AGI. The results indicate that conventional governance mechanisms do not match the dynamic, emergent AGI systems, requiring a changed regime of governance based on dynamic monitoring and stakeholder involvement, and anticipatory risk management. A multi-tiered governance model with technical, organizational and policy-level guardrails is presented, using empirical evidence of the existing AI governance experiences across multiple industries. The paper is a valuable addition to the body of literature on responsible AI, since it provides practical guides to anticipatory AGI governance that can adapt to changes in technology in embracing ethical standards and retaining a healthy dose of public trust.