Research Seminar: How I learned to stop worrying and love AI

Content

In Voltaire's Candide, Dr. Pangloss is relentlessly optimistic in the face of novella's unflinching portrait of the human condition; his opposite, Martin, is pessimistic and cynical.  Today's developments around Artificial Intelligence are being driven by similarly opposing forces.  The Panglossian approach views AI as humanity's grasping of Promethean fire whereas others see existential risk and threats to human safety, privacy, and wellbeing.  We might hope that the reality is somewhere in between; and we might suspect that the reason for these extreme views is that we probably have the problems around AI framed incorrectly.

This presentation attempts to summarize my personal views regarding AI that I have developed during my decade away from academia in various forms of public service.  First, as a member of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) leadership team in the Defense Sciences Office (2014-2017); next as the founding director of the Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security, the Department of Defense's university-affiliated research center (UARC) for the social sciences and AI at the University of Maryland (2018-2023); and lastly as Senior Advisor for AI Risk Modeling for Biden Administration's Office of Science and Technology Policy (2023-2024).  The bottom line, upfront: 

-- Current AI narratives are techno-philic and need to be re-framed because the thorniest problems are decidedly non-technical---they are mostly about AI's interaction with, and influence on, people and society;

-- Unlike physics and engineering we do not yet have the required level of scientific understanding about AI and its effects on people and society needed to establish rigorous engineering practices and manage its use; and, lastly

-- The impacts of AI, operating at various levels in our society (ranging from individuals to our planetary community as a whole), are going to be uneven in scale, speed, and impact.

I would rather not merely admire these problems, hence I will try to re-frame them as inherently socio-technical.  I will provide a practical methodology for identifying emerging scientific and engineering questions related to the ongoing integration of AI with humans and society.  Using this approach, I will provide several examples of research questions that merit investigation.  In the end, I hope to provide a unique perspective on recent developments in AI and a tangible means by which we might address these daunting emerging challenges.