 According to Cave, what must happen before different disciplines converge to guide AI development?
The Centre for the Future of Intelligence is seeking to investigate the implications of artificial intelligence for humanity, and make sure humans take advantage of the opportunities while dodging the risks. Because no single discipline is ideally suited to this task, the centre emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary knowledge-sharing and collaboration. It is bringing together a diverse community of some of the world's best researchers, philosophers, psychologists, lawyers and computer scientists. Executive director of the centre is Stephen Cave, a writer, philosopher and former diplomat. Harry Armstrong, head of futures at Nesta, which publishes The Long + Short, spoke with Cave about the impact of AI. Do you see the interdisciplinary nature of the centre as one of its key values and one of the key impacts you hope it will have on the field? Stephen Cave: Thinking about the impact of AI is not something that any one discipline owns or does in any very systematic way. So if academia is going to rise to the challenge and provide thought leadership on this hugely important issue, then we’re going to need to do it by breaking down current disciplinary boundaries and bringing people with very different expertise together. That means bringing together the technologists and the experts at developing these algorithms together with social scientists, philosophers, legal scholars and so forth. We want to create a space where many different disciplines can come together and develop a shared language, learn from each other’s approaches, and hopefully very quickly move to be able to actually develop new ideas, new conclusions, together. The current dominant political and economic ideologies, along with growing isolationist sentiment, runs contrary to the bipartisan, collaborative approaches needed to solve global issues like climate change. With AI, that has been the case so far; although not on the same scale. And that a broad buy-in by society into some kind of vision of the future in which this technology plays a role is required, if a dangerous – or to them dangerous – counteraction is to be avoided. One of the dominant narratives around not only AI but technology and automation more generally is that we, as humans, are at the mercy of technological progress. There can be a bit of a conflict between being impacted by what's happening and having some sort of control over what we want to happen. But that's different when we consider ourselves at a level of a society, as a polis [city state], or as an international community. In any given country, we have regulations. Technology is emerging from a certain legal, political, normative, cultural, and social framework.
 establishing dialogue
 government support  signing a treatise  creating shared policies  establishing dialogue