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The United Nations Security Council will meet in New York this week for its inaugural discussion on artificial intelligence (AI) and the risks it creates for global security.
Britain, which currently holds the presidency of the UN Security Council, has called for a meeting to discuss the regulation of AI.
The meeting, spearheaded by British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, will discuss the implications that AI presents regarding international security and the ethical limitations of the technology.
The discussion, which will occur on Tuesday (18 July), is unlikely to be the last international discussion on the dangers of AI as the moral and ethical limitations of its use vary internationally. However, it remains a good step in the right direction towards global regulation and the prevention of dangerous AI development.
The AI frontier has spawned rather rapidly over the last couple of years, raising the concern around regulation regarding the development of AI.
With the potential to change the face of international security, governments worldwide, as well as the private sector, have been calling for dangerous development to be curbed.
The chief executive of ChatGPT creator Open AI, Sam Altman, expressed his concerns about the potential risks that AI development poses.
Altman spoke in front of US Congress in May, saying that while AI is an incredibly powerful tool, it has the potential to create major dangers with security and influence human decisions.
“I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be quite vocal about that; we want to work with the government to prevent that from happening,” said Altman.
“We try to be very clear about what the downside case is and the work that we have to do to mitigate that.”
These concerns include weaponised disinformation that could influence elections or even target opinions at an individual level.
Altman went on to say that regulatory measures and enforceable frameworks from governments would be necessary to ensure that AI remains a useful tool for the betterment of mankind.
These regulatory frameworks would require AI models to meet specific safety standards while being evaluated by independent auditors and having to pass specific test models before launch.
“We think that regulatory intervention by governments will be critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models,” he said.
“For a very new technology, we need a new framework.”
The Centre for AI Safety (CAIS) has said that AI could lead to human extinction if not properly regulated.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” said CAIS in the one-sentence release.
Other experts have said that while this is a legitimate concern, AI is far from the cyborg Armageddon depicted in the Terminator franchise and that comments like the one above take away from the current concerns.
“Current AI is nowhere near capable enough for these risks to materialise. As a result, it’s distracted attention away from the near-term harms of AI,” said Princeton University scientist Arvind Narayanan, speaking with the BBC.
While chatbots like ChatGPT have inbuild ethical limitations to prevent their use for malicious purposes, such as aiding cyber criminals (a real concern that is being explored by cyber security experts), a number of limitless chatbots are starting to pop up, pointing out the need for regulation.
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