Artificial intelligence joins the list of large complex world challenges that world leaders and diplomats will approach during the annual high -level meeting of this week.
Since the AI boom started with the beginnings of chatgpt about three years ago, the breathtaking capacities of technology have surprised the world. Technological companies have run to develop larger and better AI systems, even if experts warn against their risks, including existential threats such as engineering pandemics and large -scale disinformation, and call guarantees.
The adoption by the UN of a new governance architecture is the last and the greatest effort to brake the AI. The previous multilateral efforts, including three summits of the AI organized by Great Britain, South Korea and France, have only led to non-binding commitments.
Last month, the General Assembly adopted a resolution aimed at creating two key organizations on AI – a global forum and an independent scientific panel of experts – in a transition to world governance efforts for technology.
On Wednesday, a meeting of the United Nations Security Council will convene an open debate on the issue. Among the questions to be resolved: how can the advice help guarantee the responsible application of AI to comply with international law and support peace processes and conflict prevention?
And Thursday, as part of the annual meeting of the organization, the Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres will hold a meeting to launch the forum, called the global dialogue on AI governance.
It is a place for governments and “stakeholders” to discuss international cooperation and the sharing of ideas and solutions. He should officially meet in Geneva next year and in New York in 2027.
Meanwhile, recruitment should start to find 40 experts for the scientific panel, including two co -presidents, one from a developed country and one of a developing nation. The panel has established comparisons with the UN climate change panel and its flagship annual COP meeting.
The new bodies represent “a symbolic triumph”. They are “by far the most inclusive approach to the world to govern AI,” wrote Isabella Wilkinson, researcher at the London Chatham House reflection group, in a blog article.
“But in practice, the new mechanisms seem to be mainly helpless,” she added. Among the possible problems, it is a question whether the administration of the UN exercise is able to regulate rapid technology such as AI.
Before the meeting, a group of influential experts called on governments to agree on the so-called red lines for AI to take effect by the end of next year, claiming that technology needs “minimum railings” designed to prevent “the most urgent and unacceptable risks”.
The group, including senior employees of Chatgpt Maker Openai, the AI research laboratory of Google Deepmind and the Chatbot Anthropic manufacturer, want governments to sign an international binding agreement on AI. They underline that the world has already agreed with treaties prohibiting nuclear tests and biological weapons and protecting the high seas.
“The idea is very simple,” said one of the donors, Stuart Russell, professor of AI at the University of California in Berkeley. “As we do with drugs and nuclear power plants, we can demand that the developers prove security as a market access condition.”
Russell has suggested that the United Nations governance could resemble the functioning of another unresolved body, the International Civil Aviation Organization, which coordinates with security regulators in different countries and ensures that they all work on the same page.
And rather than defining a set of rules that are established in stone, diplomats could write a “framework convention” flexible to be updated to reflect the latest advances in AI, he said.
