This post was written by Cansu Kutay and is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written.

When I first set out to write this piece, I struggled with where to begin because the topic could be approached from so many angles. It could be framed through the lens of Big Tech, data privacy and surveillance, labour and energy costs, ethics and economics, or through concrete outcomes of AI already being deployed in society. This topic is far too wide to tackle in a short blog post, but, this challenge further proved to me the necessity for at least providing an introduction on why politicizing this struggle is necessary. When it comes to AI safety, we must take our security into our own hands.

The growing influence of AI presents us with a fundamental challenge that extends beyond technical solutions. The struggle for safe AI is inherently a political struggle that demands societal transformation. AI systems are sociotechnical in nature (Kudina et al., 2024): they are influenced by and influence societal dynamics and human behaviour. AI safety cannot be understood in isolation and must be viewed from its broader societal, ethical and governmental context. Right now, safety is an afterthought, but it needs to be integrated into the whole process. The technical solutions we have right now - red-teaming, robustness testing, value alignment - are very impactful, but they are short-term solutions. AI safety requires significant transformation in communities and governments. Technical safeguards can mitigate risks, but with broader shifts in values, governance, and culture, we cannot address the deeper societal consequences posed by AI.

To tackle this subject, I will begin by exploring what politics itself is, how AI will reshape many aspects of human existence, and why democracy demands that citizens have a voice in governing technologies that will profoundly affect their lives.

What is Politics?

According to Wikipedia, an overall definition of politics could be summed as: “the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.” There are many political philosophers who offer their own definition, but they mainly converge on ...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments