Urs Gasser

Urs Gasser

Urs Gasser is a legal scholar who studies how societies govern digital technology. With Viktor Mayer-Schönberger he wrote Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI, published by Princeton University Press in 2024, which argues that the structures guiding human decisions should leave those decisions with people rather than hand them to machines.

Who they are

In 2021 the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University announced that Gasser, its executive director for twelve years, would take up an inaugural professorship of public policy, governance and innovative technology at the Technical University of Munich. In the acknowledgments of Guardrails (page 193) he thanks his students at Harvard Law School and at the Technical University of Munich.

This page records only what institutional pages and the book state. Biography beyond that is not given here.

Key papers

Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI (2024), with Mayer-Schönberger.** The book defines a guardrail as more than a rule: at page 10 it is "the 'system' around a naked norm, the processes and institutions, that makes guardrails work." At page 3 guardrails "show you where the edge is, making it less likely that you'll step over without meaning to. But they aren't like prison walls." Chapter 1 opens with the 2002 midair collision over Überlingen, in which a flight crew received conflicting instructions from a human controller and an automated warning system and followed the human. Chapter 6 (pages 100 to 121) sets out three design principles: guardrails should empower individuals, be anchored in social processes, and encourage learning. Chapter 7 adds self-restraint.

Key ideas

The book's foundational claim is that good guardrails empower the person deciding rather than supplant them. The authors present it openly as a value: at page 120 they say their principles "are not value-neutral". They are also candid about uncertainty, conceding at page 109 that "there is no guarantee that well-intended measures to enable decisions will lead to successful outcomes."

Applied to medicine, the principle supports keeping a clinician responsible for decisions that AI informs. The research on doctors working with AI, including studies of automation bias and deskilling, suggests that such human oversight has to be designed and tested to deliver better outcomes, which sits comfortably with the book's own concession at page 109.

Sources

  1. Gasser, U., & Mayer-Schönberger, V. (2024). Guardrails: Guiding Human Decisions in the Age of AI. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691150680.
  2. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (2021). Urs Gasser to embark on new role across the Atlantic. cyber.harvard.edu