GENEVA, Switzerland – Humanity is in a race in opposition to time to harness the colossal rising energy of synthetic intelligence for the great of all, whereas averting dire dangers, a prime UN official mentioned Thursday.
“We’ve let the genie out of the bottle,” mentioned Doreen Bogdan-Martin, head of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
“We are in a race against time,” she informed the opening of a two-day AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva.
“Recent developments in AI have been nothing short of extraordinary.”
The hundreds gathered on the convention heard how advances in generative AI are already rushing up efforts to unravel a few of the world’s most urgent issues, reminiscent of local weather change, starvation and social care.
“I believe we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to guide AI to benefit all the world’s people,” Bogdan-Martin informed AFP forward of the summit.
But she lamented Thursday that one-third of humanity nonetheless stays fully offline, and is “excluded from the AI revolution without a voice”.
“This digital and technological divide is no longer acceptable.”
Bogdan-Martin highlighted that AI holds “immense potential for both good and bad”, stressing that it was very important to “make AI systems safe”.
Concentrated energy
She mentioned that was particularly vital provided that “2024 is the biggest election year in history”, with votes in dozens of nations, together with within the United States.
She flagged the “rise of sophisticated deep fakes disinformation campaigns” and warned that the “misuse of AI threaten democracy (and) also endangers young people’s mental health and compromises cyber-security.”
Other specialists at Thursday’s convention agreed.
“We have to understand what we’re steering towards,” mentioned Tristan Harris, a expertise ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology.
He pointed to classes from social media — initially touted as a option to join folks and provides everybody a voice, however which additionally introduced habit, viral misinformation, on-line harassment and ballooning psychological well being points.
Harris warned the motivation driving the businesses rolling out the expertise risked dramatically swelling such adverse impacts.
“The number one thing that is driving Open AI or Google behavior is the race to actually achieve market dominance,” he mentioned.
In such a world, he mentioned, “governance that moves at the speed of technology” is important.
Changing the social contract
OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who rose to world prominence after OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, acknowledged the hazards.
Speaking through video-link, he informed the gathering that “cyber-security” was at present the largest concern when it got here to adverse impacts of the expertise.
Further down the highway, he mentioned there would probably “be some change required to the social contract, given how powerful we expect this technology to be”.
“I’m not a believer that there won’t be any jobs… but I do think the whole structure of society itself will be (open to) some degree of debate and reconfiguration.”
Overall although, he insisted that from the attitude of how new applied sciences evolve traditionally, the AI methods had been “generally considered safe and robust”.
While welcoming discussions round rules to stem short-term adverse impacts of AI, he warned that it was “difficult” to counsel rules geared toward reining in future impacts.
“We don’t know how society and this technology are going to co-evolve,” he mentioned.
Bogdan-Martin in the meantime hailed that governments and others had lately “raced to establish protections” and regulation round using AI.
On Wednesday the European Union introduced the creation of an AI Office to manage synthetic intelligence underneath a sweeping new legislation.
“It’s our responsibility to write the next chapter in the great story of humanity, and technology, and to make it safe, to make it inclusive and to make it sustainable,” Bogdan-Martin mentioned. — Agence France-Presse
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
