On April 25th, the Oxford Centre for Technology and Global Affairs welcomed Tantum Collins to speak at our first lunchtime seminar of the term on “AI, the Study of International Affairs, and the Art of Governance”. Collins works directly with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on special research and strategy projects.
Collins made a compelling case for the further use of machine learning techniques in the social sciences, and international relations (IR) in particular. He argued that machine learning provides opportunities to achieve new levels of rigorous and predicative efficacy within the discipline.
The opportunities for incorporating machine learning methods in social science research are also becoming more accessible: the computation required is now cheap and readily available while there are an increasing number of online resources that enable social scientists to learn AI methods.
AI has the potential to affect almost all industries and sectors. It is now up to the IR discipline to embrace its research potential. Supporting such work is one of the Centre's core academic missions.
