The slides are here: Regulating Dangerous Technologies (I’ve included some slides in the posted slides that I didn’t present in class but you might find interesting, including some excerpts from a talk I gave in 2018 on Mutually Assured Destruction and the Impending AI Apocalypse.)
Since one of the groups made the analogy to tobacco products, I also will take the liberty of pointing to a talk I gave at Google making a similar analogy: The Dragon in the Room.
Stephanie made the point after class about how important individuals making brave decisions is to things working out, in particular with humanity (so far!) avoiding annihilating ourselves with nuclear weapons. Stanislav Petrov may well have been the single person between us and nuclear destruction in 1983, when he prevented an alert (which he correctly determined was a false alarm) produced by the Soviet detection system from going up the chain.
Here’s one (of many) articles on this: ‘I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut’, Washington Post, 10 Feb 1999. There is still a lot of uncertainty and skepticism if we should be fearing any kind of out-of-control AI risk, but it is not so hard to imagine scenarios where our fate will similarly come down to an individual’s decision at a critical juncture. (On the other hand, this article argues that we shouldn’t oversensationalize Petrov’s actions and there were many other safeguards between him and nuclear war, and we really shouldn’t design extinction-level systems in a way that they are so fragile to depend on an individual decision: Did Stanislav Petrov save the world in 1983? It’s complicated, from a Russian perspective.)