Technology: Humanity is in a “race against time” against AI

Humanity is in a race against time to learn how to harness artificial intelligence for the common good while avoiding the terrible risks it poses, a senior UN official and experts said Thursday.

“We have let the genie out of the bottle,” said Doreen Bogdan-Martin, director of the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

“We are in a race against time,” she said at the opening of a two-day global summit called “AI for Good” in Geneva. “Recent developments in AI are simply extraordinary,” she acknowledged.

Thousands of conference attendees learned that advances in generative AI are already accelerating efforts to solve some of the planet’s most pressing problems, such as climate change, hunger and welfare.

“I think we have an opportunity, as happens once in a generation, to put AI at the service of everyone on the planet,” Doreen Bogdan-Martin said in an email sent to AFP before the top. But she deplored Thursday that a third of humanity still remains completely disconnected and is “excluded from the AI ​​revolution without being able to express itself.”

Doreen Bogdan-Martin stressed that AI holds “tremendous potential, both for good and evil,” and that it is essential to “secure AI systems.” She said this was particularly important today, given that “2024 is the biggest election year in history,” with votes in dozens of countries, including the United States.

However, “with the rise of sophisticated disinformation campaigns such as deep fake, it is also the most controversial year,” she added. “Not only does this misuse of AI threaten democracy, but it also endangers the mental health of young people and compromises cybersecurity,” warns this official.

In a speech at another AI governance event this week, the ITU chief warned that “the power of AI is concentrated in the hands of of too few.” “It’s risky and ethically fragile to be in this kind of position for humanity,” she said.

Other experts present at the conference agreed with this. “We need to understand where we are heading,” said Tristan Harris, a technology ethicist who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology.

He recalled the lessons learned from social media, which was initially presented as a way to connect people and give everyone a voice, but which also spawned addiction, viral misinformation, online harassment and an explosion in mental health problems among adolescents. .

While AI can benefit humanity in many ways, Tristan Harris warned that the incentives driving companies to deploy the technology risk significantly increasing these negative effects.

“The main motivation for Open AI or Google’s behavior is the race for market dominance,” he said. In such a world, he added, “governance that evolves at the speed of technology” is vital.

OpenAI director Sam Altman, who rose to prominence worldwide after the release of ChatGPT in 2022, acknowledged that this technological advancement could carry dangers. Speaking via video link, he told the gathering that “cybersecurity” was currently the biggest concern when it comes to the potential negative effects of AI.

However, in the longer term, he said it would probably be necessary to “modify the social contract, given the expected power of this technology”. Overall, however, he insisted that, from the perspective of the historical evolution of new technologies, AI systems were “generally considered safe and robust.”

While welcoming discussions on regulations aimed at stemming the short-term negative effects of AI, he warned that it was “difficult” to suggest regulations aimed at limiting its development.