Published:

• Robert Trager, Ben Harack, Anka Reuel, et al. International Governance of Civilian AI: A Jurisdictional Certification Approach. Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, 2023. (See also this blog post which summarizes the key points.)

Working papers:

• Verification for International AI Governance
  Summary

  Examining the potential international agreements that can be made over AI and some of the ways that they can be verified. Verification here is proving that the other side is adhering to their commitments.

• The mobility of power: How growing technological superiority can allow war to be triggered by predicted arms transfers
  Summary

  This paper examines the potentially destabilizing effects of increased power mobility—the ability for leading technological states to transfer meaningful amounts of military power to another state in a short amount of time. In particular, it explores the potential for increased power mobility to trigger a set of interacting commitment problems between authoritarian states and their neighbors which can lead to war. This theoretical framework potentially helps clarify why Vladimir Putin chose to make increasingly extreme demands and then launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2021-2022. The similar strategic situation between Taiwan and China does not appear to be susceptible to the same instabilities at the present time, but near-term technological change may exacerbate this problem, potentially opening a path to war. Lastly, the paper discusses international arrangements with the potential to mitigate some of the most important future problems of this kind.

• Perceptions of existential risk contributed to the end of the Cold War nuclear arms race
  Summary

  Examining whether the advent of truly “existential” concerns during the Cold War (due to the idea of nuclear winter, etc.) led to a shift in rhetoric, behavior, and policy for the superpowers that differed substantially from their behavior under mutually-assured destruction.

• Existential risk and cooperation in indefinitely iterated social dilemmas
  Summary

  Understanding how “social dilemmas” in game theory (such as the prisoner’s dilemma) are different under existential risk than under other kinds of risk. This work models races toward transformative technologies as an indefinitely iterated social dilemma, where defection by either player leads to existential risk - a permanent loss of a portion of all future payoffs for all players. Modeled in this way, the problem of existential risk also brings the seeds of its own solution. Stable cooperation becomes possible in not only the indefinitely iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, but also in indefinitely iterated Deadlock.

• Guns, butter, and interdependence
  Summary

  Synthesizing and challenging a set of realist and liberal claims about the interplay between economic interdependence and war. This work provides a theoretical and empirical basis for seeing international politics as an evolving system driven toward new equilibria by technological change with its details shaped by both war and enduring policies.