United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called for “less hype, less fear” surrounding artificial intelligence, saying a newly established expert body is intended to “make human control a technical reality”.
Guterres announced that the United Nations General Assembly has confirmed 40 members to serve on the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.
“Science-led governance is not a brake on progress” but can make it “safer, fairer, and more widely shared”, he told the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
“The message is simple: Less hype, less fear. More facts and evidence.”
The advisory group, designed to play a role for artificial intelligence similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in addressing global warming, was established in August.
Its inaugural report is expected ahead of the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance scheduled for July.
The panel is intended to support governments as they craft regulations for AI, a rapidly advancing technology that has raised concerns worldwide about employment disruption, misinformation and online abuse.
“AI innovation is moving at the speed of light — outpacing our collective ability to fully understand it — let alone govern it,” Guterres said.
“We are barrelling into the unknown.”
“When we understand what systems can do — and what they cannot — we can move from rough measures to smarter, risk-based guardrails,” he said.
Earlier this month, Guterres proposed a roster of experts to serve on the UN’s AI panel, including Filipino journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and Canadian AI researcher Yoshua Bengio.
“Our goal is to make human control a technical reality — not a slogan,” he said.
That “requires clear accountability — so responsibility is never outsourced to an algorithm”.
Later Friday, dozens of heads of state and government ministers were expected to issue a joint statement outlining a global approach to artificial intelligence, concluding the five-day summit dedicated to the technology.
