I’m glad to see that growing the field of AI governance is being prioritized. I would (and in a series of posts elsewhere on the forum, will) argue that, as part of the field development, the distinction between domestic and international governance could be valuable. Both can be covered by field-growing initiatives of course, but each involve distinct expertises and probably have different enough candidate profiles that folks thinking of getting into either may need to pursue divergent paths at a certain point.
Of course, I may be speaking too much from “inside” the field as it were. Was this distinction considered when articulating that point? Or does that strike you as too fine a point to focus on at this stage?
Hi Matt, I think it’s right that there’s some distinction between domestic and international governance. Unless otherwise specified, our project ideas were usually developed with the US in mind. When evaluating the projects, I think our overall view was (and still is) that the US is probably the most important national actor for AI risk outcomes and that international governance around AI is substantially less tractable since effective international governance will need to involve China. I’d probably favour more effort going into field-building focused on the US, then the EU, then the UK, in that order, before focusing on field-building initiatives aimed at international orgs.
In the short term, it seems like prospects for international governance on AI are low, with the political gridlock in the UN since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think there could be some particular international governance opportunities that are high-leverage, e.g. making the OECD AI incidents database very good, but we haven’t looked into that much.
I’m glad to see that growing the field of AI governance is being prioritized. I would (and in a series of posts elsewhere on the forum, will) argue that, as part of the field development, the distinction between domestic and international governance could be valuable. Both can be covered by field-growing initiatives of course, but each involve distinct expertises and probably have different enough candidate profiles that folks thinking of getting into either may need to pursue divergent paths at a certain point.
Of course, I may be speaking too much from “inside” the field as it were. Was this distinction considered when articulating that point? Or does that strike you as too fine a point to focus on at this stage?
Hi Matt, I think it’s right that there’s some distinction between domestic and international governance. Unless otherwise specified, our project ideas were usually developed with the US in mind. When evaluating the projects, I think our overall view was (and still is) that the US is probably the most important national actor for AI risk outcomes and that international governance around AI is substantially less tractable since effective international governance will need to involve China. I’d probably favour more effort going into field-building focused on the US, then the EU, then the UK, in that order, before focusing on field-building initiatives aimed at international orgs.
In the short term, it seems like prospects for international governance on AI are low, with the political gridlock in the UN since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think there could be some particular international governance opportunities that are high-leverage, e.g. making the OECD AI incidents database very good, but we haven’t looked into that much.