A Privacy Hero's Final Wish: An Institute to Redirect AI's Future - Digital Wisdom

Yesterday, hundreds in Eckersley's community of friends and colleagues packed the pews for an unusual sort of memorial service at the church-like sanctuary of the Internet Archive in San Francisco--a symposium with a series of talks devoted not just to remembrances of Eckersley as a person but a tour of his life's work. Facing a shrine to Eckersley at the back of the hall filled with his writings, his beloved road bike, and some samples of his Victorian goth punk wardrobe, Turan, Gallagher, and 10 other speakers gave presentations about Eckersley's long list of contributions: his years pushing Silicon Valley towards better privacy-preserving technologies, his co-founding of a groundbreaking project to encrypt the entire web, and his late-life pivot to improving the safety and ethics of AI. The event also served as a kind of soft launch for AOI, the organization that will now carry on Eckersley's work after his death. Eckersley envisioned the institute as an incubator and applied laboratory that would work with major AI labs to that take on the problem Eckersley had come to believe was, perhaps, even more important than the privacy and cybersecurity work to which he'd devoted decades of his career: redirecting the future of artificial intelligence away from the forces causing suffering in the world, toward what he described as "human flourishing." "We need to make AI not just who we are, but what we aspire to be," Turan said in his speech at the memorial event, after playing a recording of the phone call in which Eckersley had recruited him.