Building blocks are overlayed with digital squares that highlight people living their day-to-day lives through windows. Some of the squares are accompanied by cursors.

Ben Buchanan, until recently the Biden administration’s AI special adviser, joins Ezra Klein to discuss lots of things about AI in the past, present, and future. It’s particularly interesting because, as Klein points out, Buchanan “is not a guy working for an A.I. lab. So he’s not being paid by the big A.I. labs to tell you this technology is coming.”

There’s a lot of US-specific conversation, but I’m most interested in the impact on labour markets, which I think we’re already seeing even with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the rise of the surveillance state.

One of the things which is most markedly different between my childhood and that of my two teenagers is the amount of surveillance and tracking of everyday life which is seen as ‘normal’. Even small, relatively prosaic things, such as messaging app showing by default that a message has been ‘read’. Or location tracking, whether it’s via Snap Maps, ANPR cameras on roads, or CCTV in city centres.

As mentioned in a previous post, you need to be very careful about norms, policies, and laws you encode into AI enforcement / policing / standardisation.

I would decompose this question about A.I. and autocracy or the surveillance state into two parts.

The first is the China piece of this. How does this play out in a state that is truly, in its bones, an autocracy and doesn’t even make any pretense toward democracy?

I think we could agree pretty quickly here that this makes very tangible something that is probably core to the aspiration of their society — of a level of control that only an A.I. system could help bring about. I just find that terrifying.

As an aside, there’s a saying in both Russian and Chinese: “Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away.”

Historically, even in those autocracies, there was some kind of space where the state couldn’t intrude because of the scale and the breadth of the nation. And in those autocracies, A.I. could make the force of government power worse.

Then there’s the more interesting question in the United States: What is the relationship between A.I. and democracy?

I share some of the discomfort here. There have been thinkers, historically, who have said that part of the ways we revise our laws is when people break the laws. There’s a space for that, and I think there is a humanness to our justice system that I wouldn’t want to lose.

We tasked the Department of Justice to run a process and think about this and come up with principles for the use of A.I. in criminal justice. In some cases, there are advantages to it — like cases are treated alike with the machine.

But also there’s tremendous risk of bias and discrimination and so forth because the systems are flawed and, in some cases, because the systems are ubiquitous. And I do think there is a risk of a fundamental encroachment on rights from the widespread unchecked use of A.I. in the law enforcement system that we should be very alert to and that I, as a citizen, have grave concerns about.

Source: The Ezra Klein Show (archived version)

Image: Emily Rand & LOTI