Artificial Canaries: Early Warning Signs for Anticipatory and Democratic Governance of AI
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Journal Title
International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence
ISSN
1989-1660
Publisher
Universidad Internacional de La Rioja
Volume
6
Issue
5
Pages
100-100
Language
en
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
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Zoe Cremer, C., & Whittlestone, J. (2021). Artificial Canaries: Early Warning Signs for Anticipatory and Democratic Governance of AI. International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence, 6 (5), 100-100. https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.011
Abstract
We propose a method for identifying early warning signs of transformative progress in artificial intelligence (AI), and discuss how these can support the anticipatory and democratic governance of AI. We call these early
warning signs ‘canaries’, based on the use of canaries to provide early warnings of unsafe air pollution in coal
mines. Our method combines expert elicitation and collaborative causal graphs to identify key milestones
and identify the relationships between them. We present two illustrations of how this method could be
used: to identify early warnings of harmful impacts of language models; and of progress towards high-level
machine intelligence. Identifying early warning signs of transformative applications can support more efficient
monitoring and timely regulation of progress in AI: as AI advances, its impacts on society may be too great to
be governed retrospectively. It is essential that those impacted by AI have a say in how it is governed. Early
warnings can give the public time and focus to influence emerging technologies using democratic, participatory
technology assessments. We discuss the challenges in identifying early warning signals and propose directions
for future work.
Identifiers
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.9781/ijimai.2021.02.011
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/318673
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Publisher's own licence