UN holds first-ever talks on artificial intelligence

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday artificial intelligence (AI) has enormous potential for "good and evil" at scale and urged the international community to approach this technology with a sense of urgency, a global lens, and a learner’s mindset.

The UN Security Council held a formal meeting on the global implications of AI for the first time chaired by UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, whose country is the president of the 15-member Council for the month of July.

There are concerns and calls for slowing the pace of new developments in artificial intelligence that has rapidly expanded in recent months as companies like OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft continue to build systems.

Several notables in the field, including Elon Musk, demanded a pause on rapid developments citing "profound risks to society".

Speaking at the Council, Guterres said that AI could contribute between $10 and $15 trillion dollars to the global economy by 2030 citing finance industry estimates.

But, he also warned that AI could cause "horrific levels of deaths and destruction" and could "enable new levels of authoritarian surveillance".

"Its creators themselves have warned that much bigger, potentially catastrophic, and existential risks lie ahead," Guterres said. "Without action to address these risks, we are derelict in our responsibilities to present and future generations".

Guterres welcomed calls from some member states for the creation of a new UN entity to support collective efforts to govern this extraordinary technology, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Briefing the council, the co-founder of AI company Anthropic, Jack Clark said that the development of artificial intelligence cannot solely be left to private sector actors.

"The governments of the world must come together, develop state capacity and make further development of powerful AI systems, a shared endeavor across all parts of society, rather than one dictated solely by a small number of firms competing with one another in the marketplace," Clark said.

'Human control'

Professor Zeng Yi, director of the brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Lab and co-director of the China-UK Research Center for AI Ethics and Governance, said that AI should never ever pretend to be human, take the human position or mislead the human to have the wrong perception.

"We should use generative AI to assist but never trust them to replace human decision-making. We must ensure human control for all AI-enabled weapon systems and the human control has to be sufficient effective, responsible," he said.

British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly called for global governance of artificial intelligence.

"No country will be untouched by AI, so we must involve and engage the widest coalition of international actors from all sectors," he said.

Cleverly said that the UK plans to bring world leaders together for the first major global summit on AI safety this autumn.

"We must seize these opportunities and grasp the challenges of AI – including those for international peace and security – decisively, optimistically, and from a position of global unity on essential principles," he added.