81. Nicolas Miailhe - AI risk is a global problem
Towards Data Science
04/28/21
•56m
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In December 1938, a frustrated nuclear physicist named Leo Szilard wrote a letter to the British Admiralty telling them that he had given up on his greatest invention — the nuclear chain reaction.
"The idea of a nuclear chain reaction won’t work. There’s no need to keep this patent secret, and indeed there’s no need to keep this patent too. It won’t work." — Leo SzilardWhat Szilard didn’t know when he licked the envelope was that, on that very same day, a research team in Berlin had just split the uranium atom for the very first time. Within a year, the Manhatta Project would begin, and by 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It was only four years later — barely a decade after Szilard had written off the idea as impossible — that Russia successfully tested its first atomic weapon, kicking off a global nuclear arms race that continues in various forms to this day.
It’s a surprisingly short jump from cutting edge technology to global-scale risk. But although the nuclear story is a high-profile example of this kind of leap, it’s far from the only one. Today, many see artificial intelligence as a class of technology whose development will lead to global risks — and as a result, as a technology that needs to be managed globally. In much the same way that international treaties have allowed us to reduce the risk of nuclear war, we may need global coordination around AI to mitigate its potential negative impacts.
One of the world’s leading experts on AI’s global coordination problem is Nicolas Miailhe. Nicolas is the co-founder of The Future Society, a global nonprofit whose primary focus is encouraging responsible adoption of AI, and ensuring that countries around the world come to a common understanding of the risks associated with it. Nicolas is a veteran of the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School of Government, an appointed expert to the Global Partnership on AI, and advises cities, governments, international organizations about AI policy.
Previous Episode
80. Yan Li - The Surprising Challenges of Global AI Philanthropy
April 21, 2021
•45m
We’ve recorded quite a few podcasts recently about the problems AI does and may create, now and in the future. We’ve talked about AI safety, alignment, bias and fairness.
These are important topics, and we’ll continue to discuss them, but I also think it’s important not to lose sight of the value that AI and tools like it bring to the world in the here and now. So for this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr Yan Li, a professor who studies data management and analytics, and the co-founder of Techies Without Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to using tech for humanitarian good. Yan has firsthand experience developing and deploying technical solutions for use in poor countries around the world, from Tibet to Haiti.
Next Episode
82. Jakob Foerster - The high cost of automated weapons
May 5, 2021
•54m
Automated weapons mean fewer casualties, faster reaction times, and more precise strikes. They’re a clear win for any country that deploys them. You can see the appeal.
But they’re also a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Once many nations have deployed them, humans no longer have to be persuaded to march into combat, and the barrier to starting a conflict drops significantly.
The real risks that come from automated weapons systems like drones aren’t always the obvious ones. Many of them take the form of second-order effects — the knock-on consequences that come from setting up a world where multiple countries have large automated forces. But what can we do about them? That’s the question we’ll be taking on during this episode of the podcast with Jakob Foerster, an early pioneer in multi-agent reinforcement learning, and incoming faculty member at the University of Toronto. Jakob has been involved in the debate over weaponized drone automation for some time, and recently wrote an open letter to German politicians urging them to consider the risks associated with the deployment of this technology.
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