In December 1938, a frustrated nuclear physicist named Leo Szilard wrote a letter to the British Admiralty telling them that he had given up on his greatest invention — the nuclear chain reaction.
"The idea of a nuclear chain reaction won’t work. There’s no need to keep this patent secret, and indeed there’s no need to keep this patent too. It won’t work." — Leo Szilard
What Szilard didn’t know when he licked the envelope was that, on that very same day, a research team in Berlin had just split the uranium atom for the very first time. Within a year, the Manhatta Project would begin, and by 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It was only four years later — barely a decade after Szilard had written off the idea as impossible — that Russia successfully tested its first atomic weapon, kicking off a global nuclear arms race that continues in various forms to this day.
It’s a surprisingly short jump from cutting edge technology to global-scale risk. But although the nuclear story is a high-profile example of this kind of leap, it’s far from the only one. Today, many see artificial intelligence as a class of technology whose development will lead to global risks — and as a result, as a technology that needs to be managed globally. In much the same way that international treaties have allowed us to reduce the risk of nuclear war, we may need global coordination around AI to mitigate its potential negative impacts.
One of the world’s leading experts on AI’s global coordination problem is Nicolas Miailhe. Nicolas is the co-founder of The Future Society, a global nonprofit whose primary focus is encouraging responsible adoption of AI, and ensuring that countries around the world come to a common understanding of the risks associated with it. Nicolas is a veteran of the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School of Government, an appointed expert to the Global Partnership on AI, and advises cities, governments, international organizations about AI policy.