Essays Tagged "Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center"
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AI and Trust
I trusted a lot today. I trusted my phone to wake me on time. I trusted Uber to arrange a taxi for me, and the driver to get me to the airport safely. I trusted thousands of other drivers on the road not to ram my car on the way. At the airport, I trusted ticket agents and maintenance engineers and everyone else who keeps airlines operating. And the pilot of the plane I flew. And thousands of other people at the airport and on the plane, any of which could have attacked me. And all the people that prepared and served my breakfast, and the entire food supply chain—any of them could have poisoned me. When I landed here, I trusted thousands more people: at the airport, on the road, in this building, in this room. And that was all before 10:30 this morning…
We Don’t Need to Reinvent Our Democracy to Save It from AI
When is it time to start worrying about artificial intelligence interfering in our democracy? Maybe when an AI writes a letter to The New York Times opposing the regulation of its own technology.
That happened last month. And because the letter was responding to an essay we wrote, we’re starting to get worried. And while the technology can be regulated, the real solution lies in recognizing that the problem is human actors—and those we can do something about.
Our essay argued that the much heralded launch of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, a system that can generate text realistic enough to appear to be written by a human, poses significant threats to democratic processes. The ability to produce high quality political messaging quickly and at scale, if combined with AI-assisted capabilities to strategically target those messages to policymakers and the public, could become a powerful accelerant of an already sprawling and poorly constrained force in modern democratic life: lobbying…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.