Antonio Guterres,secretary general of the United Nations
“We are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from government to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” Antonio Guterres,secretary general of the United Nations, said as he appealed for international agreement on new AI safeguards.
UN:The secretary general of the United Nations stepped up his calls for regulation of AI to avert a dystopian future of rampant corporate power and killer robots.
Antonio Guterres used his final address to world leaders at the UN General Assembly to sound the alarm about the dangers of AI, arguing that the rapid advance of frontier models risk undermining nation states.
“We are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of power away from government to a handful of private corporations and individuals,” Guterres said Tuesday as he appealed for international agreement on new AI safeguards.
“It is advancing at extraordinary speed and racing ahead of our ability to understand its full consequences,” he added.
After a decade at the head of the UN, the 77-year-old set out a bleak vision of a world wracked by war and “weaponized” hunger, accelerating climate change and dwindling respect for human rights and the rule of law.
He singled out AI and the data-center arms race as the defining power in a period of dramatic change and, in a nod to the US and China, called for guardrails to ensure the technology can be developed safely.
“Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation,” he said.
World leaders converged on New York for the UN’s annual gathering at a moment of escalating anxiety after researchers at the most advanced AI developers warned that the technology could wipe out humanity without proper controls.
OpenAI, which opened the AI era with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, on Monday called for internationally agreed standards to ensure that AI can be developed safely.
Also on Monday, the UN’s AI panel of experts released a report cautioning that increasingly capable models could escape human control and leaders from over 20 countries and the European Union called for mandatory safety testing of advanced AI models and potentially a new global institution to ensure humans retain control.
Pope Leo in May said artificial intelligence should be “disarmed” to protect humanity, a warning that has been echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and French President Emmanuel Macron.
OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman [addressed] the UN Security Council on Wednesday and will attend a White House state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The rapid development of AI is one of the issues likely to feature in Xi’s meeting with President Donald Trump earlier in the day.
Bloomberg