Jonathan Zittrain: Sorting through AI's Big Picture Possibilities

How can we make sense of the (possible, contingent) transformations that AI will occasion, especially to our scholarly enterprise? First, it helps to try to nail down what AI's current capabilities and plausible future prospects are. Both are in deep contention. I'll lay out a way I've been sorting views about AI — among accelerationists, safetyists, and skeptics — and then, with the help of our colleague Jack Cushman, broach the question of how much large language models and their successors will be offered in a proprietary client-server model vs. a DIY open source, run-on-your-laptop mode. Any resolution of those divides will greatly impact the ways in which academia will interact with the technology and be able to understand and shape it for our work.

Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, director of the Harvard Law School Library, and co-founder and director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

His research interests include the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence; battles for control of digital property; the regulation of cryptography; new privacy frameworks for loyalty to users of online services; the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture; and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education.