Why do you care about AI Existential Safety?

In the security, defense and justice spaces, important questions arise about AI, power and accountability. As AI systems recognize our faces, analyse public procurement and are posited as solutions to unmanageable judicial loads, it is imperative to ask how to deploy and govern these technologies within a framework of Human Rights, the Rule of Law and good governance principles.

On the one hand, the spectres of privacy violation, black box syndrome, wired-in biases, exponential growth in inequalities and even human obsolescence are fearsome prospects. However, the possibility of, inter alia, slashing court case waiting times, identifying corruption cases and exploiting big data to address transnational crime, is tantalizing and must be pursued.

It is in this context that governance actors must contribute to the discussion and policy making, to catch up with technological advances and to explore proactively how AI systems can be used for the benefit of well governed and accountable security sectors.

Please give at least one example of your research interests related to AI existential safety:

The world’s oceans are a source of prosperity but also an arena of maritime crime and insecurity including trafficking, illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing and environmental crime. A major task here is to first track and understand these security problems so that governance can be built to address them. This is made difficult by the sheer size of maritime domain.

Coalitions of international CSOs work on a global level to build accountability and oversight for maritime trafficking and illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, as well as labour violations on the high seas, offering evidence and policy recommendations to governments on maritime governance. They use AI technology to build vessel-tracking models from a huge data set drawn from satellite data, vessel beacons and onshore registries. The AI technology is used to red-flag vessels against risks of committing maritime crime.

This case study is useful because it directly impinges on maritime security in terms of tracking criminality at sea. It sheds light on the use of AI systems by non-governmental bodies. It is also an interesting case of AI models being used to sift through enormous amounts of data from different data sources (satellite, shore registry, vessel beacons). Furthermore, the tracking effort is done via a coalition of NGOs, which offers useful perspectives on collaborative approaches between technologists and governance specialists.