AI and Trust

This transcript of Bruce Schneier’s lunchtime lecture at the Kennedy School is worth reading in full. He presents a loose case for how and why to regulate the deployment of AI:

In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category error. We will think of AIs as friends when they’re really just services. Three, that the corporations controlling AI systems will take advantage of our confusion to take advantage of us. They will not be trustworthy. And four, that it is the role of government to create trust in society. And therefore, it is their role to create an environment for trustworthy AI. And that means regulation. Not regulating AI, but regulating the organizations that control and use AI.

The ability to access to free, public events like this lunch is one of the things I miss most about living in Boston area.