DARON ACEMOGLU
PARIS – I was fortunate to participate in the recent AI Action Summit in Paris, where many discussions emphasized the need to steer AI in a more socially beneficial direction. At a time of increasingly loud calls for AI acceleration from Silicon Valley – and now from the US government – the opportunity to focus on what we want from the technology was like a breath.
As I noted in one of my speeches, we should start by asking what is valuable and worth amplifying in human societies. What makes us so special, or at least successful in evolutionary terms, is our ability to devise solutions to problems large and small, to try new things, and to find meaning in such efforts. We have a capacity not only to create knowledge, but also to share it. Though the human journey has not always been smooth – our capabilities, machines, and knowledge sometimes cause profound harms – constant inquiry and prolific sharing of information is essential to what we are.
For more than 200,000 years, technology has been central to this story. From the days of stone tools to the present, we have built the solutions to our challenges; and from oral storytelling and the invention of writing to the printing press and the internet, we have developed new and better ways of sharing knowledge. Within the past 200 years, we have also figured out how to experiment better and more freely, and we have communicated this knowledge, too. The scientific process gave us established facts, allowing each generation to build on its predecessors’ advances.
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