Yesterday, hundreds of Eckersley’s community of friends and colleagues filled the pews for an unusual kind of memorial service at the church-like sanctuary of the Internet Archive in San Francisco—a conference with a series of talks devoted not only to remembering Eckersley as a person but as a tour of his life’s work. Facing the Eckersley shrine at the back of a hall filled with his writings, his beloved road bike and some samples of his Victorian goth punk wardrobe, Turan, Gallagher and 10 Other speakers presented Eckersley’s long list of contributions: his years pushing Silicon Valley toward better privacy-preserving technologies, his co-founder on a groundbreaking project break to encrypt the entire web and his end-of-life pivot to improve the safety and ethics of AI.
The event also served as a sort of soft launch for AOI, which will now continue Eckersley’s work after his death. Eckersley envisions the institute as an incubator and application lab that will work with major AI labs to tackle what Eckersley believes is perhaps more important than the privacy and cybersecurity work that Eckersley does. he devoted decades of his life. career: redirecting the future of artificial intelligence away from the forces that cause suffering in the world, toward what he describes as “human flourishing.”
“We need to make AI not just who we are, but who we aspire to be,” Turan said in a speech at the memorial event, after playing a recording of the phone call Eckersley had made. recruit him. So it can lift us in that direction.
The mission Eckersley conceived for the AOI stems from the growing sense over the past decade that AI has a “coherence problem”: That its evolution is moving forward at an increasingly rapid pace, but with simple goals that don’t match the goals of artificial intelligence. the health and happiness of mankind. Instead of opening up a paradise of creative enrichment and entertainment for everyone, Eckersley believes that, on its current trajectory, AI will more than likely amplify all the forces that are destructive. world: environmental destruction, exploitation of the poor and rampant nationalism, to name a few.
The goal of AOI, as described by Turan and Gallagher, is not to try to stifle AI’s progress but to control it. target stay away from those evil, destructive forces. They argue that it is humanity’s best hope to prevent, such as super-intelligent software that can brainwash people through advertising or propaganda, corporations with strategies and divine power to Harvest every last hydrocarbon from the earth or automated hacking systems that can penetrate any network in the world. world to cause global turmoil. “AI failures will not be like nanorobots suddenly crawling all over us,” Turan said. “These are economic and environmental disasters that look very recognizable, similar to what is happening now.”
Gallagher, now chief executive officer of AOI, stressed that Eckersley’s vision for the institute is not that of a doomed Cassandra, but of a shepherd who can guide AI towards dreams his ideal dream in the future. “He never thought about how to prevent astigmatism. His eternally optimistic way of thinking was, ‘how do we create the utopia?’,” she said. “What can we do to build a better world and how can artificial intelligence work for human development?”
