Earlier this spring, I had the chance to sit down in person with Professor Gabriel Weil here in New York to discuss his proposal for mitigating catastrophic risk from artificial intelligence. Professor Weil's proposal involves instituting a new punitive damages framework, which would increase defiance to AI companies in near miss scenarios where an AI generated harm was limited in its impact, but could have been catastrophic.

Much of our discussion comes from Professor Weil's paper, “Tort law is a tool for mitigating catastrophic risk from artificial intelligence.” Professor Weil is a Professor of Law at Toro University, and his work is now partially funded by Open Philanthropy. We start by discussing the definition of harmful AI activity before walking through a case study to demonstrate how the proposal would work in practice. We also contrast Professor Weil's proposal with the current state of law and talk about some criticisms he's received in his response. I thought it was a fascinating conversation, and I think you will, too.