Abstract: Trusting a friend and trusting a service are fundamentally different. The former is personal and intimate, while the latter is impersonal and can scale to all of human society. The companies behind the current generative AI systems are poised to exploit that difference. Their intimate conversational nature will cause us to think of them as friends when they are actually services, and trusted confidents when they will be actually be working against us. Like much of the internet, these systems will collect our personal data behind our backs and try to manipulate our behavior. Enabling trust in AI systems will require two things. The first are foundation models that are not controlled by corporations and the profit motive. The second is government regulation of the industry. Democratic governance is how we create social trust in our society.
Speaker
Bruce SchneierAdjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School