"General Assembly Week" at the UN always seems more like a three-ring circus than a global confab of world leaders.
Nearly 90 heads of state, 43 heads of government, and a crown prince all addressed the United Nations General Assembly over the past week. Dozens of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) looking for money, influence, and TV face time crowded the lobbies and anterooms of the four UN buildings in Turtle Bay, hoping to get their pet project, issue, or grievance heard by an international VIP.
All that was missing were the trained seals and stale popcorn.
This week, in addition to climate change, war, peace, and the creation of fictitious countries ("Palestine"), the crisis over artificial intelligence and who would be in charge of its governance was on the agenda. This weighty matter was actually being seriously discussed by nations that don't have it but want it, nations that have it but don't want to share it, and nations that don't have enough of it and want to be able to steal what they don't have.
"Because the challenges and opportunities are global, the responses also need to be far more comprehensive than the fragmented and siloed solutions that have been enacted thus far," a UN press release on "AI governance" said.
If this was a call for more international cooperation on the development and governance of AI, that would be acceptable. Donald Trump said in his address to the General Assembly that the White House will be “pioneering an AI verification system that everyone can trust” in order to "enforce the Biological Weapons Convention," reports NBC News.
“Hopefully, the UN can play a constructive role, and it will also be one of the early projects under AI,” Trump said. AI “could be one of the great things ever, but it also can be dangerous, but it can be put to tremendous use and tremendous good.”
On Thursday, the UN introduced the Global Dialogue on AI Governance, the first effort to globalize AI governance. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the body would “lay the cornerstones of a global AI ecosystem that can keep pace with the fastest-moving technology in human history.”
The UN should keep its grubby paws as far from AI governance as possible. Why? Nothing the United Nations has ever done in its entire existence was fair, efficacious, or worked as intended. Why should anyone think they'd be anything but a disaster for the world if they had any real say in how AI is used?
“I think it’s a misrepresentation to say that the U.N. is somehow getting into the regulation of AI,” Amandeep Singh Gill, the UN’s special envoy for digital and emerging technologies, said. “These are not top-down power grabs in terms of regulation. The regulation stays where regulation can be done in sovereign jurisdictions.”
Fox. Henhouse. No chicken for dinner.
“We totally reject all efforts by international bodies to assert centralized control and global governance of AI," said Michael Kratsios, the U.S. director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
In remarks immediately following Kratsios’ comments, China’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Ma Zhaoxu said, “It is vital to jointly foster an open, inclusive, fair and nondiscriminatory environment for technological development and firmly oppose unilateralism and protectionism.”
“We support the U.N. playing a central role in AI governance,” Ma said.
One day after Kratsios’ remarks at the Security Council, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez seemed to push back on Kratsios and gave full-throated support for international cooperation on AI and the U.N.’s role in AI governance.
“We need to coordinate a shared vision of AI at a global level, with the U.N. as the legitimate and inclusive forum to forge consensus around common interests,” Sánchez said. “The time is now, when multilateralism is being most questioned and attacked, that we need to reaffirm how suitable it is in addressing challenges such as those represented by AI.”
China supports global governance because either they will find a way for any global governing body to do their bidding or they'll give lip service to whatever is proposed and go along their merry way doing whatever the hell they want to. Ditto Russia.
I would like to see some cooperation with developed countries, including China, to keep AI from running amok and realizing our worst fears about its development. A small group could be created not to "govern" AI but to police rogue nations and operations threatening to get out of control.
Anything is better than giving the United Nations any power whatsoever to oversee AI.
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