Ben Buchanan
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Ben Buchanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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legacy power systems and server mainframes and the like that could be two decades old that haven't been turned off. So that I think is where I feel the risk most acutely. I think for all of the risks that come with the monoculture of most people's personal tech platforms these days, one of the upsides is they do push security updates pretty regularly.
They push them with new emojis that get people to download the updates. And on balance, I think people are probably better at patching their personal software now than they were 15 years ago.
I've worked in this gift the last four years, a secure room where you can't bring your phone and all that. That is annoying. There's no doubt about it.
Of AI labs. Yeah. I worry about it. I think it's a hacking risk here. I also, you know, if you hang out in the right San Francisco house party, they're not sharing the model, but they are talking to some degree about the techniques they use and the like, which have tremendous value. I do think it is the case to come back to this kind of intellectual through line of this is...
national security-relevant technology, maybe world-changing technology that's not coming from the auspices of the government and doesn't have the kind of government imprimatur of security requirements. That shows up in this way as well. We, in the National Security Memorandum, the president's side, tried to signal this to the labs and tried to say to them, we are, as the U.S.
government, want to help you in this mission. This was signed in October of 2024, so there wasn't a ton of time for us to build on that. But I think it's a priority for the Trump administration. And I can't imagine anything that is more nonpartisan than protecting American companies that are inventing the future.
Yeah, I think we were pretty public about this. And the president signed a national security memorandum, which is basically the national security equivalent of an executive order that says this is a fundamental area of importance for the United States. I don't even know the amount of satellite images that the United States collects every single day, but it's a huge amount.
And we have been public about the fact that we simply do not have enough humans to go through all of this satellite imagery, and it would be a terrible job if we did. And there is a role for AI in going through these images of hotspots around the world, of shipping lines and all that, and analyzing them in an automated way and surfacing the most interesting and important ones for human review.
And I think at one level, you can look at this and say, well, doesn't software just do that? And I think that at some level, of course, is true. At another level, you could say the more capable that software, the more capable the automation of that analysis, the more intelligent advantage you extract from that data. And that ultimately leads to a better position for the United States.
I think that's basically true. I think you need to have it. I firmly believe you need to have rights and protections that hopefully are pushing back and saying, no, there's key kinds of data here, including data on your own citizens. And in some cases, citizens of allied nations that you should not collect, even if there's an incentive to collect it.
And for all of the flaws of the United States economy, intelligence oversight process and all the debates we could have about this, we do have those kinds of structures. And that, I think, is fundamentally more important for the reason you suggest in the era of tremendous AI systems.
Yeah, I would decompose essentially this question about AI and autocracy or the surveillance state, however you want to define it, into two parts. The first is the China piece of this. How does this play out in a state that is truly in its bones in autocracy and doesn't even make any pretense towards democracy and the like? And I think we can probably agree pretty quickly here. This
makes very tangible something that, you know, is probably core to the aspirations of their society of like a level of control that only an AI system could help bring about that I just find terrifying.
As an aside, I think there's a saying in both Russian and Chinese, something like heaven is high and the emperor is far away, which is like historically, even in those autocracies, there was some kind of space where the state couldn't intrude because of the scale and the breadth of the nation. And It is the case that in those autocracies, I think AI could make the force of government power worse.
Then there's a more interesting question in the United States. Basically, what is the relationship between AI and democracy? And I think I share some of the discomfort here. There have been thinkers historically who have said, you know, part of the way is in which we revise our laws, our people break the laws, and there's a space for that.
And I think there is a humanness to our justice system that I wouldn't want to lose. and we tasked the Department of Justice in running a process and thinking about this and coming up with principles for the use of AI in criminal justice.
I think there's, in some cases, advantages to it, like cases are treated alike with the machine, but also I think there's tremendous risk of bias and discrimination and so forth because the systems are flawed, and in some cases because the systems are ubiquitous. And I do think there is a risk of a fundamental risk
encroachment on rights from the widespread unchecked use of AI in the law enforcement system that we should be very alert to and that I as a citizen have grave concerns about.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's just go in order. But basically, bottom line, I think I, in the White House and now post-White House, greatly share a lot of this discomfort.
And I think part of the appeal for something like the export controls is it identifies a choke point that can differentially slow the Chinese down, create space for the United States to have a lead, ideally, in my view, to spend that lead on safety and security.
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