Author: Stephen McGregor

Robots seem to be everywhere all of a sudden. From demonstrations of robots using the state-of-the-art in AI to follow human commands, to promises that robots will become fixtures in workplaces and homes in the near future, a survey of technology media could give the impression that the world is about to be inundated with…

Let’s have a little fun with a science fiction thought experiment. Let’s imagine a planet in the full, throbbing bloom of biodiversity, painted with all the vibrant colours of a rich assortment of lifeforms interacting across a complex network of ecosystems. Now let’s imagine that into this panoply of life there emerges a new species…

Let’s say we find ourselves presented, at some point in the not-too-distant future, with an AI that claims to be able to communicate with us in a useful way about making some kind of a plan. Before engaging in a consequential way with this AI, we would reasonably like to have a good degree of…

The beginning of November has been marked by the occasion of an international AI Safety Summit, intended as the beginning of "urgent talks on the risks and opportunities posed by rapid advances in frontier AI". Based on reports emerging from the event, the tone was a mixture of collective enthusiasm for containment and nation-specific posturing.…

In late October 2023, a number of well-known figures co-authored a short note on Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress. This serves as the latest instalment in what has become something of a genre: thoughtful messages from thoughtful people communicating concern about what might go wrong with artificial intelligence. This sentence, found…