What would your AI red lines be?
Decide now what would make you act on AI, and what you'd do. Then share it.
Hold to it
Make it stick
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Writing a red line down is a start. These steps make it more likely you'll keep it. Do each one, or skip it, and the next one opens.
Where the evidence comes from
From a 2016 review of 138 trials with 19,951 people (Harkin and others, Psychological Bulletin). In each trial, some people were prompted to keep track of a goal and others weren't. On average, the people who were prompted did better at reaching it.
- Keeping track helped more when other people could see it (0.55) or when it was reported to someone (0.47) than when it stayed private (0.19).
- It helped more when people kept a written record (0.43) than when they didn't (0.29).
The numbers are effect sizes: bigger means it helped more.
Nearly all the trials were about health goals, like weight or blood pressure. Nobody has tested red lines for AI, so read this as a guide, not a promise. Writing a line down doesn't mean you'll keep it. These steps make it more likely.
Read the review, or the free copy.
Has it
happened?
Has a line been crossed?
Things that have happened in AI, with their sources. If one crosses one of your red lines, say so here and see what you said you'd do. Your answers stay in your draft.
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The wall
Other people's red lines
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Los Alamos
1944
The one who left
Joseph Rotblat was a Polish physicist working in Liverpool when the war began. In 1944 he went to Los Alamos with the British team on the Manhattan Project. He had one reason for being there: the fear that Nazi Germany would build an atomic bomb first.
By the end of 1944 it was clear Germany would not. The reason he had come no longer held, so he resigned and went back to Liverpool. He is the only scientist known to have left the project on grounds of conscience.
Most of us never write down why we're somewhere. When things change slowly, nothing tells us to stop. Rotblat had that moment because he knew his reason. This page started as The Rotblat Line, to help you write down yours: the specific things that would make you act, and what you'd do, whether that's quitting, speaking up or finally getting involved. He was born on 4 November, so that's the day it suggests re-reading your red lines each year.
- 1908Born in Warsaw on 4 November
- 1944Joins Los Alamos, and leaves before the year is out
- 1957Co-founds the Pugwash Conferences
- 1995Shares the Nobel Peace Prize with Pugwash
- 2005Dies in London, aged 96