All Research
AI Regulation
Risk management in the Artificial Intelligence Act
The proposed EU AI Act is the first comprehensive attempt to regulate AI in a major jurisdiction. This article analyses Article 9, the key risk management provision in the AI Act. It gives an overview of the regulatory...
Political Science and International Relations
Safety-Performance Tradeoff Model Web App
This web app is a tool for exploring the dynamics of risky AI competition: the safety-performance tradeoff. Will AI safety breakthroughs always lead to safer AI systems? Before long, we may be capable of creating AI systems...
Economics of AI
Preparing for the (Non-Existent?) Future of Work
This Brookings working paper presents an analysis of how institutions could be set up to prepare for a scenario of increasingly smart autonomous machines which could replace human labor and...
Political Science and International Relations
The IAEA Solution: Knowledge Sharing to Prevent Dangerous Technology Races
The world appears to be entering an era of heightened great power technological competition in areas such as artificial intelligence. This is concerning because deploying new technologies often involves private benefits and...
Political Science and International Relations
Emerging Technologies, Prestige Motivations and the Dynamics of International Competition
The study of international races has focused almost exclusively on security motivations for competitive arming. But international races may also be motivated by prestige. This article defines a “prestige race” and outlines the...
Computer Science
RAFT: A Real-World Few-Shot Text Classification Benchmark
Large pre-trained language models have shown promise for few-shot learning, completing text-based tasks given only a few task-specific examples. Will models soon solve classification tasks that have so far been reserved for...
Political Science and International Relations
Coercion and the Credibility of Assurances
What makes coercion succeed? For most international relations scholars, the answer is credible threats. Yet scholars have neglected a second key component of successful coercion: credible assurances. This article makes two...
Policy Advice and Opinion
Futureproof: Artificial Intelligence Chapter
Out of the wreckage of the Second World War, the UK transformed itself. It rebuilt its shattered economy. It founded the NHS. It created national insurance. And it helped establish international institutions like the United...
AI Progress and Forecasting
Emerging Institutions for AI Governance: AI Governance in 2020
Much AI governance work involves preparation for a constitutional moment: an opportunity to create long-lasting, decision-shaping, institutions. Doing this well is a formidable task. It requires a fine balance. Institutions...
Political Science and International Relations
Engines of Power: Electricity, AI, and General-Purpose Military Transformations
Major theories of military innovation focus on relatively narrow technological developments, such as nuclear weapons or aircraft carriers. Arguably the most profound military implications of technological change, however, come...
Political Science and International Relations
The Logic of Strategic Assets: From Oil to AI
What resources and technologies are strategic? Policy and theoretical debates often focus on this question, since the “strategic” designation yields valuable resources and elevated attention. The ambiguity of the very concept...
Political Science and International Relations
The Offense-Defense Balance and The Costs of Anarchy: When Welfare Improves Under Offensive Advantage
A large literature has argued that offensive advantage makes states worse off because it can induce a security dilemma, preemption, costly conflict, and arms races. We argue instead that state welfare is u-shaped under...
Other Technologies
A Tour of Emerging Cryptographic Technologies
Historically, progress in the field of cryptography has been enormously consequential. Over the past century, for instance, cryptographic discoveries have played a key role in a world war and made it possible to use the internet..
Survey Research
Skilled and Mobile: Survey Evidence of AI Researchers' Immigration Preferences
Countries, companies, and universities are increasingly competing over top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) researchers. Where are these researchers likely to immigrate and what affects their immigration decisions? We...
Macrostrategy
Cooperative AI: Machines Must Learn to Find Common Ground
To help humanity solve fundamental problems of cooperation, scientists need to reconceive artificial intelligence as deeply social. Artificial-intelligence assistants and recommendation algorithms interact with billions of peop...
Political Science and International Relations
China's Growing Influence over the Rules of the Digital Road
This essay examines the growing role of China in international standards-setting organizations as a window into its efforts to influence global digital governance institutions and highlights areas where the U.S. can preserve...
History
International Control of Powerful Technology: Lessons from the Baruch Plan for Nuclear Weapons
The invention of atomic energy posed a novel global challenge: could the technology be controlled to avoid destructive uses and an existentially dangerous arms race while permitting the broad shari...
Political Science and International Relations
Reputations for Resolve and Higher-Order Beliefs in Crisis Bargaining
Reputations for resolve are said to be one of the few things worth fighting for, yet they remain inadequately understood. Discussions of reputation focus almost exclusively on first-order belief change—A stands firm, B updates...
Political Science and International Relations
Coercion and Provocation
Threats and force, by increasing expected costs, should reduce the target’s resolve. However, they often seem to increase resolve. We label this phenomenon provocation. We review instances of apparent provocation in interstate...
Macrostrategy
Open Problems in Cooperative AI
Arguably, the success of the human species is rooted in our ability to cooperate. Since machines powered by artificial intelligence are playing an ever greater role in our lives, it will be importa...
Security
Beyond Privacy Trade-offs with Structured Transparency
Many socially valuable activities depend on sensitive information, such as medical research, public health policies, political coordination, and personalized digital services. This is often posed a...
Political Science and International Relations
The Suffragist Peace
Preferences for conflict and cooperation are systematically different for men and women: across a variety of contexts, women generally prefer more peaceful options and are less supportive of making threats and initiating...
Macrostrategy
AI Governance: Opportunity and Theory of Impact
Advances in AI are likely to be among the most impactful global developments in the coming decades, and that AI governance will become among the most important global issue areas. AI governance is ...
History
How Will National Security Considerations Affect Antitrust Decisions in AI? An Examination of Historical Precedents
Artificial Intelligence (AI)—like past general purpose technologies such as railways, the internet, and electricity—is likely to have significant effects on both national security and market struct...
AI Progress and Forecasting
Social and Governance Implications of Improved Data Efficiency
Many researchers work on improving the data efficiency of machine learning. What would happen if they succeed?This paper explores the social-economic impact of increased data efficiency. Specifical...