Peter Eckersley, a privacy and technology leader, contacted AI entrepreneur Deger Turan a week before he unexpectedly passed away in September 2021. Eckersley invited Turan to become the president of his new institute, which aimed to steer AI’s evolution towards safeguarding the future of humanity. Due to colon cancer, Eckersley was unable to run the project himself, and the co-founder of the organization, Brittney Gallagher, was on maternity leave.
They agreed to meet in San Francisco to plan the institute, but when Turan arrived, he found out that Eckersley had died. In the days leading up to his death, Eckersley had already informed the board of his organization, the AI Objectives Institute (AOI), that Turan would be its president. Eckersley had also written an incomplete will that named AOI as the inheritor of his US-based assets, stating that “We started something important. I’d want to see whether the people involved could get it a little further.” Turan never had the chance to tell Eckersley that he accepted the role, but after his friend’s death, he knew that it was the most important work he could do to establish a central pillar of his legacy. Thus, Turan accepted the role and pledged to take the institute all the way.
Laura Helen Winn’s photograph captures Peter Eckersley on a San Francisco evening bike ride in 2021. The day before, the Internet Archive hosted a memorial symposium for Eckersley where his friends and colleagues spoke about his life’s work, pushing Silicon Valley towards privacy-preserving technologies, co-founding a project to encrypt the web, and focusing on AI’s safety and ethics. The event also served as a soft launch for AOI, the organization that will carry on Eckersley’s work, redirecting the future of artificial intelligence towards human flourishing. AOI aims to steer AI objectives away from destructive forces that could harm the world.
According to Gallagher, the Executive Director of AOI, Eckersley’s vision for the institute was that of a shepherd guiding AI towards his idealistic dreams for the future, rather than that of a doomsaying Cassandra. The goal is to create a better world through the use of artificial intelligence to promote human flourishing, rather than preventing a dystopia. AOI is currently working on several example projects to achieve this, with the help of nine core contributors and a few grants, including a $485,000 grant from the Survival and Flourishing fund. The pilot project furthest along, called “Talk to the City,” aims to survey millions of people in a city through a ChatGPT-like interface to understand their needs and advocate for them in discussions with policymakers, journalists, and other citizens.
Other prototypes, such as “Mindful Mirror,” a personal interactive journal, and “Lucid Lens,” a browser plugin that highlights content designed to cause outrage or manipulate users in ways they’d rather avoid, are also being developed. Although these projects might sound modest, they reflect Eckersley’s approach to building simple tools that can effect profound changes. Eckersley was renowned for his work in cybersecurity and privacy, including the development of projects like Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere. His most celebrated work was his co-founding of Let’s Encrypt, a free alternative to certificate authority companies that enable website owners to use HTTPS encryption.
While launching influential projects, Eckersley was already contemplating a completely different area of technology where he believed he could make an even greater long-term impact. According to scientist and author Brian Christian, Eckersley began discussing “civilizational risk” from AI with computer scientists such as Anders Sandberg, Stuart Russell, and Nick Bostrom by 2013. Christian, who served as the master of ceremonies for Eckersley’s memorial event, stated that by the time Eckersley left the EFF in 2018, he had determined that it was time to refocus his efforts on shaping AI’s future. Christian explains that Eckersley saw AI as having higher stakes, even in its more hypothetical harms, and felt that it was urgent and the most important thing to him.
Christian notes that Eckersley’s persuasion about the magnitude of the problem transformed his thinking about AI’s future as well. Even as Eckersley’s health suddenly declined in late summer 2022, the AOI remained his focus. Nicole, Eckersley’s sister, stated that she began to hear about her brother’s vision for something like AOI in 2020. Despite his hospitalization, Eckersley continued to charge full speed ahead on AOI. Nicole said that all of Eckersley’s last wishes and instructions were about the survival of this incredibly important project. She expressed the hope that the community would see this as the start of an incredible living legacy, not just a memorial. Nicole concluded by saying, “We want to see Peter’s plans come to fruition. We want to keep engaged with this incredible community. We want to stop the robots from eating us and crapping out money.”
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Author: Andy Greenberg
