Vice Provost & Dean @NUSingapore/@NUSCollege; @NUS_Law; Director @AISingapore | AI & data | international law | occasional fiction | the odd New Yorker cartoon

Singapore
Joined August 2011
I’m thrilled that my first work of general fiction, “Artifice”, is at last available worldwide! Skip the thread and order the book here: simonchesterman.com/2023/06/… Or read on! #Artifice
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Korea has often been a bellwether for how technology may shape society: from early efforts to connect and digitalise the economy, to embracing technology in popular culture — not least K-pop virtual-reality concerts and, indeed, virtual K-pop performers.
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I’ve drawn on those remarks, and some of the conversations in Seoul, for a new paper: “Agents Without Principals? Privacy, Responsibility, and Power in the Age of Autonomous AI.”
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Hopefully it will find a journal home soon, but in the meantime the draft is available on SSRN: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.7622… #AIGovernance #Privacy #AgenticAI #ResponsibleAI
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We take our internships seriously in Singapore, but this does seem a little long to me
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Call my agents! The news around AI has been even more frenetic than usual. On the one hand, agentic AI is misaligned and coming to kill us all. On the other, AI is solving maths problems not just quickly but elegantly.
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The basics should be simple: No accountable human; no deployment. No meaningful possibility of containment: no development at all.   Plus, I managed to get in a reference to the Butlerian Jihad for all the Dune nerds out there. Enjoy! straitstimes.com/opinion/whe…
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The Straits Times is paywalled — and you should pay for journalism, right? (Right?) — but the piece is also accessible on my personal site here: simonchesterman.com/2026/10/…   #AI #AIGovernance
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One of the ideas at the heart of NUS College is that education should sometimes involve breaking open the classroom — learning not only from books and teachers, but from communities, experience, failure, and one another.
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Perhaps my favourite line in the story comes from one of our students, describing the goal of their project as making themselves “obsolete”. That is a pretty good test of genuine impact: not what happens while you are there, but what continues after you leave.
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Now that AI safety has moved from academic articles and the after-work drinks of computer engineers to the front pages of newspapers and the delegates’ lounge at the UN, the question of what global institutions might actually help govern AI is becoming more concrete.
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But many of the most consequential decisions about frontier AI remain concentrated in a very small number of private companies.
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Perhaps the emerging architecture of global AI governance is not architecture without an architect, so much as architecture designed by multiple actors with different forms of power, divergent incentives, and no common set of plans. simonchesterman.com/2026/10/…
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