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Artificial Canaries: Early Warning Signs for Anticipatory and Democratic Governance of AI

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Zoe Cremer, Carla 

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.

Description

Keywords

46 Information and Computing Sciences, 4608 Human-Centred Computing, 4602 Artificial Intelligence, 4603 Computer Vision and Multimedia Computation

Journal Title

International Journal of Interactive Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

1989-1660
1989-1660

Volume Title

6

Publisher

Universidad Internacional de La Rioja

Rights

Publisher's own licence