Giving Compass' Take:

• Assistant Professor Allan Dafoe of Political Science at Yale University is studying the implications of AI for global political stability.

• To what extent are the concerns that Dafoe outlines already in practice? How can donors help to ensure the future given the concerns of AI? 

• Learn how AI can be used to advance humanities interests.

The debate around the impacts of artificial intelligence often centers on ‘superintelligence’ – a general intellect that is much smarter than the best humans, in practically every field.

But according to Allan Dafoe – Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University – even if we stopped at today’s AI technology and simply collected more data, built more sensors, and added more computing capacity, extreme systemic risks could emerge, including:

  • Mass labor displacement, unemployment, and inequality;
  • The rise of a more oligopolistic global market structure, potentially moving us away from our liberal economic world order;
  • Imagery intelligence and other mechanisms for revealing most of the ballistic missile-carrying submarines that countries rely on to be able to respond to nuclear attack;
  • Ubiquitous sensors and algorithms that can identify individuals through face recognition, leading to universal surveillance;
  • Autonomous weapons with an independent chain of command, making it easier for authoritarian regimes to violently suppress their citizens.

Nuclear energy is useful, but it wasn’t crucially useful, whereas AI seems like it’s on track to be like the new electricity or the new industrial revolution in the sense it’s a general-purpose technology that will completely transform and invigorate the economy in every sector of the economy. That’s, I guess, one problem or one difference is that its economic bounty and the gradient of incentives to develop it are so much more substantial than most other dual-use technologies we’re used to thinking about governing.

Read the full article about AI and global political destablization by Robert Wiblin at 80000 Hours.