EA - By failing to take serious AI action, the US could be in violation of its international law obligations by Cecil Abungu

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: By failing to take serious AI action, the US could be in violation of its international law obligations, published by Cecil Abungu on May 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.“Long-term risks remain, including the existential risk associated with the development of artificial general intelligence through self-modifying AI or other means”.2023 Update to the US National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan.IntroductionThe United States is yet to take serious steps to govern the licensing, setting up, operation, security and supervision of AI. In this piece I suggest that this could be in violation of its obligations under Article 6(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). By most accounts, the US is the key country in control of how quickly we have artificial general intelligence (AGI), a goal that companies like OpenAI have been very open about pursuing. The fact that AGI could carry risk to human life has been detailed in various fora and I won’t belabor that point. I present this legal argument so that those trying to get the US government to take action have additional armor to call on.A. Some important premisesThe US signed and ratified the ICCPR on June 8 1992.[1] While it has not ratified the Optional Protocol allowing for individual complaints against it, it did submit to the competence of the Human Rights Committee (the body charged with interpreting the ICCPR) where the party suing is another state. This means that although individuals cannot bring action against the US for ICCPR violations, other states can. As is the case for domestic law, provisions of treaties are given real meaning when they’re interpreted by courts or other bodies with the specific legal mandate to do so. Most of this usually happens in a pretty siloed manner, but international human rights law is famously non-siloed. The interpretive bodies determining international human rights law cases regularly borrow from each other when trying to make meaning of the different provisions before them.This piece is focused on what the ICCPR demands, but I will also discuss some decisions from other regional human rights courts because of the cross fertilization that I’ve just described. Before understanding my argument, they’re a few crucial premises you have to appreciate. I will discuss them next.(i) All major human rights treaties, including the ICCPR, impose on states a duty to protect lifeIn addition to the ICCPR, the African Charter, European Convention and American Convention have all give states a duty to protect life.[2] As you might imagine, the existence of the actual duty is generally undisputed. It is when we get to the specific content of the duty where things become murky.(ii) A state’s duty to protect life under the ICCPR can extend to citizens of other countriesThe Human Rights Committee (quick reminder: this is the body with the legal mandate to interpret the ICCPR) has made it clear that this duty to protect under the ICCPR extends not only to activities which are conducted within the territory of the state being challenged but also to those conducted in other places – so long as the activities could have a direct and reasonably foreseeable impact on persons outside the state’s territory. The fact that the US has vehemently disputed this understanding[3] does not mean it is excused from abiding by it.(iii) States’ duties to protect life under the ICCPR require attention to the activities of corporate entities headquartered in their countriesEven though the US protested the move,[4] the Human Rights Committee has been clear that the duty to protect extends to protecting individuals from violations by private persons or entities,[5] including activities by corporate entities based in their territory or subjec...