Postgraduate students, fellows, staff and faculty from any discipline are welcome. This group aims to foster frequent interdisciplinary critical dialogue across Oxford and beyond about the political impacts of emerging technologies. Please contact Elisabeth Siegel at elisabeth.siegel@politics.ox.ac.uk or Brian Kot at brian.kot@politics.ox.ac.uk in advance to participate or with any questions. Remote attendance is possible, but in-person attendance is prioritized (and provided refreshment).
Topic — AI Safety in Practice: Safeguarding Against Real-World Misuse and Near-Term Harms
AI safety has reached an inflection point, with near-term risks becoming real-world harms amidst a new political and regulatory landscape that has begun to reflect these shifts. Despite recent shifts in AI governance, preventing high-severity harms, including terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) risks, foreign influence operations, ransomware, targeted phishing campaigns, and scams remain top priorities for governments and industry alike. To examine the threat landscape, real-world use cases from malicious actors—including terrorists & extremists, criminal networks, and hostile foreign states—will be examined alongside adversarial shifts and anticipated misues. While these high-severity risks represent an urgent threat, the presentation focuses on practical solutions and present a new socio-technical approach to close the capabilities gap.
About the speaker: Broderick McDonald is an Associate Fellow at Kings College London’s International Center for the Study of Radicalisation working at the intersection of conflict, extremism, and technology. Prior to this, he served as an Advisor to the Government of Canada and was a Fellow with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC). He has provided expert analysis for a range of international news broadcasters including ABC News, BBC News, CBC News, Good Morning America, France24, and Al Jazeera News. His research and commentary has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Al Jazeera, CS Monitor, and The Globe & Mail amongst others. He previously lived in the Middle East and has conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative fieldwork with armed combatants and foreign terrorist fighters from ISIS, HTS, and other armed non-state actors. He currently serves on the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)‘s Independent Advisory Committee, the Aspen Institute UK’s RLF Advisory Board, and the GLOCA Board of Advisors. Alongside his research, Broderick has advised policymakers, parliamentarians, intelligence agencies, international prosecutors, NGOs, AI Safety Institutes, AI labs, and social media platforms on emerging technologies and security threats from terrorist & extremist entities, organized crime, and hostile foreign states.
