Imagine living in the future where technology has advanced even further and space travel is not just a dream, but an everyday reality. On every spaceship, aside from the captain and pilots, there are scientists, mechanics and onboard system specialists. At the end of the day, someone has to keep an eye on things to make sure everything works smoothly: powerful engines, atmosphere-creating tools, and the widely used artificial intelligence that helps determine the correct flight trajectory of the spaceship, write an email or recognize the language spoken by newly encountered aliens.
There are few things that haven’t changed over the past decades, but one thing certainly has – people still don’t fully understand how artificial intelligence thinks and where the decisions made by the model come from. However, everyone already realizes how crucial it is to keep AI systems safe. In the past, there were often dangerous situations where models were attacked by malicious agents. Recently, every spaceship must also have an AI safety engineer on board. No one really wants the alarm to go off again and all the models to start signaling anomaly detection in every possible system as if the ship was about to fall apart. There were situations where no one could communicate with chatbots managing the entire deck – they could only report a malfunction but didn’t explain what the exact problem was or what caused it.