N.b. I wrote an early version of this post in November 2023; I substantially revised it in March 2024.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a body of scientists charged by the UN to provide authoritative scientific reports on the status of climate change, especially to governments. A number of writers have recently called for an IPCC for AI (Suleyman et al., 2023, Mulgan et al. 2023, Maihe 2018). Full disclosure: I contributed to one of these calls. These calls tend to focus on AI safety, and their general premise is that:
- AI poses a safety risk,
- governments need to act,
- to act, governments need a neutral, scientific assessment of the state of AI, and
- an IPCC-like solution can best offer that assessment.
What follows are some notes on why the IPCC is not the right institutional solution for assessing the state of AI. Effectively, IPCC : climate :: IPAIS : AI is an incomplete analogy and thus suggests an incomplete institutional response.
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