The first global summit dedicated to the safe use of artificial intelligence started in Britain. Over the course of two days, tech giants, experts and politicians will discuss the fundamentals of regulation and safe use of artificial intelligence technologies.
The first summit of its kind is taking place at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where a codebreaking center was located during the Second World War. It was here that Alan Turing’s team revealed the secret of the Enigma code, which was used by German encryption machines.
By coincidence, it was on the first day of the summit that one of the oldest English language dictionaries, Collins, recognized AI, an abbreviation for “artificial intelligence,” as the word of 2023.
Collins reports that use of the word has quadrupled since last year.
“We know there has been a big emphasis on AI this year in the sense that it has evolved and quickly become ubiquitous, being built into our lives in emails, streaming and other everyday technologies that once seemed futuristic,” said the publishing director. publishing a dictionary.
On the first day of the summit , a “world’s first agreement” was signed on how to govern the riskiest forms of artificial intelligence.
It focuses on the so-called “advanced AI” (frontier AI) – these, in the understanding of the summit participants, are highly developed forms of this technology with as yet unknown capabilities.
The agreement was also signed by the US, EU and China.
The summit was also attended by Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla, X and x.Al , a company created last summer, which deals with artificial intelligence issues. On the eve of the meeting, he again issued a warning that AI could lead to the extinction of humanity.
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However, other summit participants spoke in a calmer spirit: in their opinion, one should refrain from speculating about unlikely threats in the future, and instead focus on the potential risks that artificial intelligence poses today – for example, threats to certain professions or bias in certain questions that the AI develops as a result of its training.
The conference also featured a pre-recorded statement from Britain’s King Charles III, in which he called the development of advanced AI “as important as the discovery of electricity.”
The UK government said that in the so-called “Bletchley Declaration” signed by summit participants, 28 countries agreed there was an urgent need to understand and collectively manage the potential risks posed by AI.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called the meeting “a landmark achievement that has seen world AI leaders agree on the urgent need to understand the risks of AI to help secure the long-term future of our children and grandchildren.”
Other countries have also emphasized the need for a global approach to managing this technology.
Relations between China and the West today often leave much to be desired, but Chinese Vice Minister of Science and Technology Wu Zhaohui said at the conference that China is committed to a spirit of openness in the field of AI.
“We call for global collaboration to share knowledge and make AI technologies accessible to everyone,” he told delegates. “China is willing to expand dialogue and communication on AI safety issues with all parties.”
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that as a result of the summit, the US will create its own AI Security Institute.
British Technology Minister Michelle Donelan, who chaired the opening of the summit, announced that the next summit will be held virtually in six months, and will be hosted by South Korea. The delegates will meet in person in a year in France.
Exterminate humanity – save the planet?
Elon Musk, who has repeatedly warned about the threat of artificial intelligence, appeared on comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast last Tuesday and said that some people could use AI to protect the planet by destroying humanity.
“If you start thinking that humans are bad, the natural conclusion is that humans should go extinct,” he said. “If AI is programmed by extinctionists, then its useful function will be the extinction of humanity… They won’t even think that this is a bad thing.”
In March of this year, Musk, along with other leading figures in the field of AI development, signed an open letter , which proposed a pause in the development of artificial intelligence technologies until reliable safety protocols were developed and applied.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only after we are confident that the consequences of their use will be positive and the risks associated with them are manageable,” the letter said.
However, already in April it became known that Musk registered the company X.AI Corp. , which was supposed to deal with issues of artificial intelligence with the goal of “knowledge of reality.”
Many experts consider fears for the fate of humanity in connection with the development of AI to be exaggerated.
Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister and now global president of Meta, who also attended the summit, said people should not allow “speculative, sometimes somewhat futuristic forecasts” to crowd out more pressing issues.
As the BBC’s climate disinformation correspondent Marco Silva points out, claims that environmentalists want to take extreme measures to reduce the world’s population have long been popular among conspiracy theorists.
Many of them believe that climate activists are part of some kind of “death cult” seeking to implement a “depopulation program” carried out through radical measures such as forced sterilization.
Of course, there is no evidence of this, and it is unlikely that among major climatologists and ecologists there will be a person ready to support such a policy to combat climate change.
Even as population growth puts enormous strain on the planet’s resources, some of the world’s most populous countries have some of the lowest per capita greenhouse gas emissions.
Many observers believe that AI’s greatest threat comes from automating human jobs or reinforcing existing biases and prejudices into new, much more powerful, online systems.
