UN report highlights huge potential benefits and great risks arising from AI

The AI race raises expectations around the tools and the millions of dollars they can generate.
Dado Ruvic/Reuters/Illustration
The rapid development of AI offers enormous potential benefits to countries and people around the world, but it also presents great risks, said 40 renowned scientists and experts in the first report prepared by an independent UN scientific panel on the technology.
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The report, which will be presented to governments at the first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva on July 6-7, offers the first independent, global scientific assessment of AI, with a more complete and comprehensive report expected next year.
Panel members were selected from all regions of the world and serve a three-year term independently of any government, institution or company.
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The following are some details from draft report:
- Policymakers need scientific evidence to govern AI, but the technology's capabilities are outstripping governments' scientific understanding and ability to adapt, with few methods available to control highly autonomous AI systems.
- Panel co-chair Yoshua Bengio noted growing evidence of deceptive AI behaviors and stated that science cannot guarantee that AI will not cause catastrophic harm "whether on its own or due to users malicious actors" as its capabilities increase.
- "The potential benefits of AI are enormous," the report concluded. "The rapid and uncontrolled deployment of technology on a large scale also presents considerable risks, including damage to users' mental health, potential use as a destructive tool, impacts on social, economic and environmental systems, and challenges associated with controlling the technology."
- AI adoption has accelerated broadly but unevenly across countries and sectors. Globally, more than a billion people now use conversational AI weekly, but adoption in developing countries is lagging.
- AI development is even more concentrated, with the US accounting for 75% of the computing power among the world's top 500 AI supercomputers, and China for 15%.
- Although more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world, current AI models are trained for only a small fraction of them, and the Machine translation of some languages is fraught with errors that can affect health diagnoses and treatment decisions.
- Risks include possible negative impacts on human rights, social systems and the environment, with the increasingly frequent circulation of AI-generated child sexual abuse material and sexual violence facilitated by deepfakes. social and democratic deliberation."
- Most countries, including advanced economies, lack the technical knowledge necessary to evaluate the most advanced new AI models or meaningfully participate in their governance.

Source: G1