At the Cobden Centre we have done a number of interesting projects on AI over the years, including organising and moderating the artificial intelligence roundtable discussions in the European Parliament. Just a few years ago, when I would talk about AI reaching human level intelligence — and moving swiftly beyond — people would assume this might happen in a hundred years. People increasingly recognise that it will happen far sooner than most have predicted.
Last month I gave a speech at Oxford University, talking through risks related to AI and how we can work to build a better future for ourselves, children and grandchildren. I spoke for nearly an hour and the audience were interested to learn more about AI safety in particular.
This year I am co-editing a book called “The Future of Artificial Intelligence,” for which we will invite experts from around the world to each write chapters. My co-editor is Lord Fairfax, who was a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on AI in Weapons Systems and has taken a lifelong interest in AI and where it might take the world. The book is to be published by Springer, currently ranked as the most elite publisher in Europe, so it will go out to universities globally to be used for teaching as well as to the wider market.
We would like to go beyond most academic books by having authors ranging from political figures to think tank analysts to military experts and businesspeople as well as academics. Currently confirmed authors include, for instance, senior politicians, military experts including a former defence minister and a former chief of the defence staff (head of the UK military), think tanks including the RAND Corporation and OECD, academics from Oxford and Cambridge among other institutions and international lawyers who have been involved in recent AI policy discussions who can speak about the political realities of these issues and how treaties might be formulated. We hope that as well as becoming the seminal book for teaching in universities, this will be useful for political figures and professionals around the world to understand the core ideas related to AI policy.
AI will change the world more than any previous technology and we must be prepared. We will have more interesting and important AI projects coming up over the next 18 months.
