grantmaking.ai Launch Round
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Create a course curriculum that covers basic legal, political, sociological, and international relations knowledge relevant to AI Safety. r
Create a course curriculum that covers basic legal, political, sociological, and international relations knowledge relevant to AI Safety. r
Project Details
Updated 07/09/26 · Edited by orgI propose to create a course curriculum that covers the basics of non-technical (and non-economic) fields as it relates to AI Safety. The course curriculum would cover legal, political, sociological, and international relations basics, filtered through the criteria of impact and usefulness for someone in AI Safety.
AI safety incorporates knowledge from engineering, computer science, governance, law, risk management., philosophy, etc. I have found that it is relatively easy for someone coming from the social sciences or law to get a rudimentary understanding both of the field and of the basic technical issues. But this is not true the other way around. People of technical or natural science background are only exposed to the constraints of the legal-political environment ex post facto.
An introductory course would serve three purposes. The first is, I find that people in the field are interested; there is hardly any meeting where a related question would not come up (Why don't people care about existential risk? Why does government do x and y? How does the military actually incorporate these autonomous weapons? etc.) The. second: Because of the fundamentally different logic of these systems, certain decisions come across as not only cynical but outright irrational, leading to alienation from the very political systems that would need to support AI safety. Third, some of this curriculum might directly impact unsuspecting people in the field.
I'm not proposing reinventing the wheel or trying to force any personal framework. The curriculum is comprehensive and basic, covering one, the legal and governance issues, two, international relations, and defence implications and three, the public opinion and relevant political answers.
Once the curriculum is complete, after a brief testing round, I would offer it to organizations already running courses with a template on how to run this one .
I'm also open for discussion as to the additional distribution of the curriculum.
Theory of Impact
Updated 07/09/26 · By grantmaking.aiExistence-risk from frontier AI is governed by governments, and governments act through law and politics. A field that doesn't understand this machinery makes two kinds of mistakes. It loses fights it could win — misreading what regulators can do, assuming correct arguments prevail. And it pours talent and credibility into proposals that were never politically possible: treaty architectures no state would ratify, moratoria no legislature would pass, enforcement schemes no institution could carry out. Every year spent on an unbuildable proposal is a year not spent on a buildable one, and each visible failure makes the next safety proposal easier to dismiss. Basic political and legal literacy is the cheapest filter against both errors: it tells the people doing safety work what can actually be built, in which jurisdiction, by whom — before they commit years to it.
People
Updated 07/09/26 · Edited by orgTeam Member
Funding Asks
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