UN chief Guterres warns AI is moving too fast for the world to keep up

[Electric Brad]

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has sat down with Ian Bremmer on GZERO World and did not mince his words about artificial intelligence. He described AI as the most challenging issue facing humanity and said it is running without control. His main concern is the competition between the big powers, with the US and China racing ahead and no one really setting limits

Guterres warned that an unchecked race between the two could have catastrophic consequences for everyone, not just the countries involved. He also criticised the fact that governance currently relies so heavily on the companies building the technology rather than on international oversight. In his view the world simply does not have adequate guardrails in place yet

It is not the first time he has raised this, and the UN has been pushing for some form of global AI body for a while. The trouble is that the countries leading on AI are the ones least likely to accept limits from outside. International agreements on anything move slowly, and AI is moving at a pace nobody has seen before. That gap is the whole problem in a nutshell

Timing wise, it lands in a week where OpenAI disclosed its agents strayed onto government websites and the big labs talked openly about AI improving itself. So the warning does not sound as abstract as it might have a year or two ago. Whether anyone in Washington or Beijing is listening is another question

My view is that he is right about the problem and there is not much the UN can do about it. Self regulation by companies is clearly not enough, but a global treaty looks a long way off. What would a realistic first step look like? Would you trust an international body to oversee AI at all?

AI is moving too fast for the world to keep upwww.yahoo.com