What I Saw in Rome

In May I sat on a panel at the Palazzo Lateranense with James Muller, who co-founded the physicians' movement that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its work on nuclear war. In July I chaired Working Group 7 of the Global Nobel Laureates Assembly at Borgo Laudato Si', inside the Vatican gardens. On the sixteenth of July, at the Campidoglio, the Assembly adopted the Rome Declaration.

What made those weeks unusual was not the guest list. It was that two populations who almost never occupy the same room were, for about three days, in the same room: the people who decide how the world should govern artificial intelligence, and the people who understand how it is actually built.

I went in expecting the hard problem to be disagreement. It wasn't. Nearly everyone in those rooms wanted approximately the same things — human control over consequential decisions, a technology that serves people rather than sorting them, an international order that survives the next ten years. The hard problem was that the two populations were describing the same object in incompatible languages, and neither could hear the other's constraints.

That gap is the thing I actually work on. Not the ethics of AI, which are being argued about competently by people better qualified than me. The gap between what a technology does and what the people deciding about it believe it does — and the way that gap compounds, quietly, through every procurement, every regulation, every architecture choice, until a country wakes up and finds that its options were foreclosed years ago by decisions nobody thought were strategic at the time.

I have spent the summer going back through it. What follows is not a report on a conference. It is an argument, built in nine parts, that ends somewhere I did not expect when I started.

I am going to publish it the way you would watch something: as a season. Nine episodes, every Tuesday, starting 20 October.

Season One — Rome

1. The Intelligence Delta
2. Data Embassies
3. Beyond the Hegemon
4. The Automation Trap
5. The Un-Glamorous Revolution
6. Democracy's New Crisis
7. The Colleague, Not the Tool
8. Ethics Over Legality
9. The Mosaic Doctrine

Each one stands on its own. But they are built in order, and the ninth is the reason for the other eight.

Episode 1 lands on 20 October, and the last one on 15 December. Subscribe and I will send them to you.