Bowen Zhou, Director and Chief Scientist of Shanghai AI Laboratory，asked Nicholas B. Dirks whether external evaluations, red teaming, and third-party verification were enough to justify handing real-world authority to AI.
"No," Nitzberg replied.
He compared AI systems to bridges. Engineers do not build a bridge first and then attack it to discover whether it is safe. The builder carries the burden of proof during design. Increasingly powerful agents, Nitzberg argued, should likewise be safe by design, with evidence before deployment that their overall behavior remains understandable and controllable.
That is why AI safety has become urgent now. Rules in aviation, finance, and medicine have often followed air crashes, financial crises, or public-health disasters. But AI cuts across all of those sectors. Its speed, scale, and cross-border reach make disaster an unacceptable starting point for governance.
Nicholas B. Dirks pointed to a second difficulty: People are already using systems they do not trust, and adoption will continue to grow. Engineering verifiability does not automatically become social trustworthiness. Trust also requires independent oversight, clear responsibility, continuous monitoring, and assessment at every stage of deployment.
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