On ‘technical levers to make AI coordination/regulation enforceable’, there is a fair amount of work suggesting that e.g. arms control agreements have often dependend on/been enabled by new technological avenues for enabling unilateral monitoring (or for enabling cooperative, but non-intrusive monitoring—e.g. sensors on missile factories, as part of the US-USSR INF Treaty), have been instrumental (see Coe and Vaynmann 2020 ).
That doesn’t mean that it’s always an unalloyed good: there are indeed cases where new capabilities can introduce new security or escalation risks (e.g. Vaynmann 2021); they can also perversely hold up negotiations; e.g. Richard Burns (link, introduction) discusses a case where the involvement of engineers in designing a monitoring system for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, actually held up negotiations of the regime, basically because the engineers focused excessively on technical perfection of the monitoring system [beyond a level of assurance that would’ve been strictly politically required by the contracting parties], which enabled opponents of the treaty to paint it as not giving sufficiently good guarantees.
Still, beyond improving enforcement, there’s interesting work on ways that AI technology could speed up and support the negotiation of treaty regimes (Deeks 2020, 2020b, Maas 2021), both for AI governance specifically, and in supporting international cooperation more broadly.
+1 to this proposal and focus.
On ‘technical levers to make AI coordination/regulation enforceable’, there is a fair amount of work suggesting that e.g. arms control agreements have often dependend on/been enabled by new technological avenues for enabling unilateral monitoring (or for enabling cooperative, but non-intrusive monitoring—e.g. sensors on missile factories, as part of the US-USSR INF Treaty), have been instrumental (see Coe and Vaynmann 2020 ).
That doesn’t mean that it’s always an unalloyed good: there are indeed cases where new capabilities can introduce new security or escalation risks (e.g. Vaynmann 2021); they can also perversely hold up negotiations; e.g. Richard Burns (link, introduction) discusses a case where the involvement of engineers in designing a monitoring system for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, actually held up negotiations of the regime, basically because the engineers focused excessively on technical perfection of the monitoring system [beyond a level of assurance that would’ve been strictly politically required by the contracting parties], which enabled opponents of the treaty to paint it as not giving sufficiently good guarantees.
Still, beyond improving enforcement, there’s interesting work on ways that AI technology could speed up and support the negotiation of treaty regimes (Deeks 2020, 2020b, Maas 2021), both for AI governance specifically, and in supporting international cooperation more broadly.