Artificial Intelligence Safety

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds both great promise, and great risk, for human society.  Technologies of the past have successfully addressed safety issues through trial-and-error responses to their failures.  The power of AI necessitates a different approach of proactive governance.

A new paper from the Future of Life Institute outlines the topics of safety research needed in advance of or in parallel with AI development in order to ensure net positive gains from the development of this technology.

There are significant open problems in the theoretical and philosophical foundation of both ethics and its uses that need to be solved for AI success.  Our society must get much better at developing fair and coherent methods of aggregating multiple peoples’ preference and values.  Constitutional institutions and the United Nations are adequate approximations for this aggregation while our civilization maintains a nation-state level of organization.  However, transnationalism is already disrupting this global order and AI will transform this beyond recognition.

We approach an inflection point for our species.  Let’s have wisdom prevail.

Emergent Endogenous Risk in System-Based Industries

The type of catastrophe that emerged within the global finance system will emerge there again, in different ways, and will also emerge within other critical systems like food, energy, communications, and information technology.

The subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 showcases a new category of system-wide risks that emerge from the collective behavior of individual institutions.  This new category of threats should be included within national infrastructure assurance plans.

A key response to the subprime contagion within the banking sector is in the form of macroprudential policy: policy seeking to improve resilience of the entire system, not just the institutions within that system. The need for macroprudential policy is not confined to banking and finance however; it applies to all system-based infrastructure sectors including communications, energy, food and agriculture, and information technology.  This paper demonstrates the existence of systemic risks to information technology to justify extension of macroprudential policy approaches to this sector.

This policy/risk mismatch summarized here arises from an aggregate decline in backup power capacity across U.S. data centers, yielding increased vulnerability year-on-year to sustained power outages.  A service failure within the energy/electricity sector may exceed in duration the threshold of tolerance of numerous data centers simultaneously as a result of the annual decline in backup power capacity.  This simultaneous trend across numerous individual actors creates an emergent endogenous risk to the system overall. This risk category that ‘emerges from within’ stands in stark contrast with the prevailing cybersecurity focus upon deterring exogenous risk.

Doing nothing has the lowest explicit cost in the short-term but will eventually result in a massive negative economic impact in the long term.  Innovative tactical regulatory approaches, such as policy for green data centers, can reduce exposure to this specific systemic risk while delivering other public benefits (e.g. lower carbon footprint), but fail to address the broader issue of other emergent endogenous risks.  The most effective approach is to nurture enterprise adaptive capacity, also known as enterprise resilience, through macroprudential policy approaches.  Borrowing innovation discovered through urban and environmental policy such as those epitomized within the Stockholm Resilience Centre, would be a good place to start.

Regional Spatial Prioritization of Safe Routes to School Program


‘Active commuting’ options such as walking or cycling have numerous public benefits. Chief among these benefits are improving population health, enhancing transportation infrastructure resilience (through multi-modal diversification) and reducing the ecological footprint for the society that adopts these options. The Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program is a U.S. Federal initiative administered in Virginia by the Department of Transportation (VDOT) and applied within local jurisdictions to encourage the identification and mitigation of infrastructure gaps that inhibit active commuting. By focusing upon safe travel for school children, the SRTS program aspires to promote the public benefits identified above, reduce total transportation infrastructure spending, and encourage affinity for active commuting in the generations to come.

To qualify for federal funds, individual schools must complete a grant application (see example for Virginia) which includes preparation of a map to identify preferred active commuting routes and target infrastructure investment proposals. But at the regional level, such as a county or metropolitan area, where should civic planners start? Which schools/areas possess the best characteristics for adopting an SRTS program?

The paper “Spatial Prioritization of SRTS Program Adoption within Fairfax County Public Schools” illustrates an approach civic planners may take when embarking on a regional assessment to prioritize community outreach efforts. The paper outlines potential criteria that may be used to identify the most attractive business cases for program introduction. The paper then applies these criteria geospatially to identify candidate schools within the Fairfax County Public School system in Virginia which have the fewest impediments for SRTS program adoption. A brief case is made to integrate individual school plans into regional commuting plans (such as rail tranport and cycleway development) to maximize program value.

More information on active commuting solutions can be found at the National Complete Streets Coalition, and a very effective regional advocacy group called Fairfax Advocates for Better Bicycling can be a great place for Fairfax County residents to get engaged in the process.

The Oceanic Exclusive Economic Zone

Exclusive Economic Zones of Australia & the USAAustralia and the United States are similar in the size and complexity of their exclusive economic zones, defined as the 200 nautical-mile wide band of ocean extending from their shores.  The two countries differ in their governance institutions for these vast underwater territories.  This paper, “Ocean Governance – Australian US Comparison,” compares and contrasts each country’s approach to governing their oceans and makes recommendations for the newly created US Interagency Oceans Policy Task Force.