Matthijs Maas
Senior Research Fellow (Law & Artificial Intelligence), Legal Priorities Project
Research Affiliate, Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.
https://www.matthijsmaas.com/ | https://linktr.ee/matthijsmaas
MMMaas
Karma: 673
Three new reports reviewing research and concepts in advanced AI governance
International AI Institutions: a literature review of models, examples, and proposals
Thanks for the overview! You might also be interested in this (forthcoming) report and lit review: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12AoyaISpmhCbHOc2f9ytSfl4RnDe5uUEgXwzNJhF-fA/edit?usp=drivesdk
I previously drew on Adler’s work to derive lessons for (military) AI governance, in: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2019.1576464
I will! Though likely in the form of a long form report that’s still in draft, planning to write it out in the next months. Can share a (very rough) working draft if you PM me.
Thanks for collating this, Zach! Just to note, my ‘TAI Governance: a Literature Review’ is publicly shareable—but since we’ll be cleaning up the main doc as a report the coming week, could you update the link to this copy? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CDj_sdTzZGP9Tpppy7PdaPs_4acueuNxTjMnAiCJJKs/edit#heading=h.5romymfdade3
Thanks for collating these comments—that’s useful to get that overview.
FWIW, some people at CSER have done good work on this broad topic, working with researchers at Chinese institutions—e.g. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-020-00402-x
This is awful—Nathan was such an engaging and bright scholar, generous with his comments and insights. I had been hoping to see much more of his work in this field. Thank you for sharing this.
I’ve got a number of literature reviews and overview reports on this coming out soon, can share you on a draft if of interest. See also the primer / overview at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/isTXkKprgHh5j8WQr/strategic-perspectives-on-transformative-ai-governance
Existential risk mitigation: What I worry about when there are only bad options
CNAS report: ‘Artificial Intelligence and Arms Control’
‘Artificial Intelligence Governance under Change’ (PhD dissertation)
+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.
That’s a great suggestion, I will aim to add that for each!
The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and lessons for AI (short essay)
A few additional papers that look into this topic, that might be of interest: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3278721.3278766
https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/6/3/53
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13523260.2019.1576464?journalCode=fcsp20
And (more narrowly focused on NAT in LAWS) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3161446
Thanks for this post, I found it very interesting.
More that I’d like to write after reflection, but briefly—on further possible scenario variables, on either the technical or governance side, I’m working out a number of these here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Mlt3rHcxJCBCGjSqrNJool0xB33GwmyH0bHjcveI7oc/edit# , and would be interested to discuss.
Thanks for these points! I like the rephrasing of it as ‘levers’ or pathways, thosea re also good.
A downside of the term ‘strategic perspective’ is certainly that it implies that you need to ‘pick one’, that a categorical choice needs to be made amongst them. However:
-it is clearly possible to combine and work across a number of these perspectives simultaneously, so they’re not mutually exclusive in terms of interventions; -in fact, under existing uncertainty over TAI timelines and governance conditions (i.e. parameters), it is probably preferable to pursue such a portfolio approach, rather than adopt any one perspective as the ‘consensus one’.
still, as tamgent notes, this mostly owes to our current uncertainty: once you start to take stronger positions on (or assign certain probabilities to) particular scenarios, not all of these pathways are an equally good investment of resources -indeed, some of these approaches will likely entail actions that will stand in tension to one another’s interventions (e.g. Anticipatory perspectives would recommend talking explicitly about AGI to policymakers; some versions of Path-setting, Network-building, or Pivotal Engineering would prefer to avoid that (for different reasons). A partisan perspective would prefer actions that might align the community with one actor; that might stand in tension to actions taken by a Coalitional (or multilateral Path-setting) perspectives; etc.).
I do agree that the ‘Perspectives’ framing may be too suggestive of an exclusive, coherent position that people in this space must take, when what I mean is more a loosely coherent cluster of views.
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@tamgent “it seems hard to span more than two beliefs next to each other on any axis as an individual to me” could you clarify what you meant by this?
Thanks for the catch on the table, I’ve corrected it!
And yeah, there’s a lot of drawbacks to the table format—and a scatterplot would be much better (though unfortunately I’m not so good with editing tools, would appreciate recommendations for any). In the meantime, I’ll add in your disclaimer for the table.
I’m aiming to restart posting on the sequence later this month, would appreciate feedback and comments.
This is very interesting, thanks for putting this together! FWIW, you might also be interested in some of the other terms I’ve been collecting for a related draft report ( see shared draft at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RNlHOt32nBn3KLRtevqWcU-1ikdRQoz-CUYAK0tZVz4/edit , pg 18 onwards)