MattThinks
Bio
Participation1
I have a PhD in history, specializing in the history of international law, international humanitarian law, and global governance. I have pursued each primarily through investigating how such systems were formed, translated, transferred, and shaped by agents under duress (often in colonial contexts or during wartime). I am currently a research associate at the University of Sussex, but also work in the learning technology space, red-teaming and evaluating the capabilities of various AI systems.
How others can help me
I am looking to transition full-time into the field of AI history, ethics, and governance.
How I can help others
I love reading, critiquing, and thought-experimenting all manner of ideas related to governance, international order, international law, capabilities and properties testing, and potential solutions. I also love tacos.
Posts 2
Comments5
Thank you for sharing this, you’ve communicated many risks clearly and succinctly.
One arena of defense AI that so far has received precious little attention I think is the potential for AI enabled warmaking to substantially degrade humanitarian conventions (such as not attacking civilian water supply, electrical grids, or sanitation facilities).
I hope to contribute some research effort to that issue soon, but I hope others do too, especially in light of the strong likelihood that more advanced long range missile systems making use of computer vision models are already being used by Russian forces against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.
I was very glad to see the research scholar pathway open up, it seems exactly right for someone like me (advanced early career, is that a stable segment?).
I’m also glad to hear of the interest too, although it’s too bad that the acceptance rate is lower than ideal. Then again, to many folks coming from academic grant funding ecosystems, 5% is fairly typical, for major funding in my fields at least.
I’m glad to see that growing the field of AI governance is being prioritized. I would (and in a series of posts elsewhere on the forum, will) argue that, as part of the field development, the distinction between domestic and international governance could be valuable. Both can be covered by field-growing initiatives of course, but each involve distinct expertises and probably have different enough candidate profiles that folks thinking of getting into either may need to pursue divergent paths at a certain point.
Of course, I may be speaking too much from “inside” the field as it were. Was this distinction considered when articulating that point? Or does that strike you as too fine a point to focus on at this stage?