10 The future of responsible AI: Risks, practices, and policy

In an infamous article for Newsweek in 1995, astronomer Clifford Stoll wrote the following about the nascent online community:

Today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher, and no computer network will change the way government works [ 1 ].

For better and for worse, the internet has done much more than Stoll expected. Digital networks have made government more democratic in some ways, but concentrated the power of authoritarians in others; they have connected people across the globe, but have also been tied to increasing social isolation; and they have reshaped the global economy.

Where are LLM developments headed?

Language as the universal interface

From tools to agentic systems

The rise of personalized AI

On the horizon

Sociotechnical risks of generative AI

Bias, toxicity, and representational harms

Hallucinations and fabrications

Privacy and data leakage

Adversarial attacks and security vulnerabilities

Autonomy and emergent agentic risks

Misuse across domains

Dependency, emotional harm, and relationship risks

Labor and economic disruption

A holistic view of harm

Best practices for responsible AI development and use

Curating datasets and standardizing documentation

Protecting data privacy

Explainability, transparency, and bias

Design interventions and architectures