AI Safety’s Spiral of Urgency w/ Shazeda Ahmed

Are you tired of hearing the phrase ‘AI Safety’ and rolling your eyes? Do you also sometimes think… okay but what is technically wrong with advocating for ‘safer’ AI systems? Do you also wish we could have more nuanced conversations about China and AI?

In this episode Shazeda Ahmed goes deep on the field of AI Safety, explaining that it is a community that is propped up by its own spiral of reproduced urgency; and that so much of it is rooted in American anti-China sentiment. Read: the fear that the big scary authoritarian country will build AGI before the US does, and destroy us all.

Further reading & resources:

• Emotional Entanglement — Article 19
• Bodily Harms by Xiaowei Wang and Shazeda Ahmed for Access Now
• Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety — First Monday
• Made in China journal
• Pause AI

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Shazeda Ahmed is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. Shazeda completed her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley’s School of Information in 2022, and was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. She has been a research fellow at Upturn, the Mercator Institute for China Studies, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, Stanford University’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) Institute, and NYU's AI Now Institute.

Shazeda’s research investigates relationships between the state, the firm, and society in the US-China geopolitical rivalry over AI, with implications for information technology policy and human rights. Her work draws from science and technology studies, ranging from her dissertation on the state-firm co-production of China’s social credit system, to her research on the epistemic culture of the emerging field of AI safety.