UN panel aims for ‘human control’ of AI: Guterres

NEW DELHI: UN chief Antonio Guterres called Friday for “less hype, less fear” over artificial intelligence as he said that a new expert panel aimed to “make human control a technical reality.”
Guterres said the United Nations General Assembly had confirmed the 40 members proposed for the group, called 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 said at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
“The message is simple: Less hype, less fear. More facts and evidence.”
The advisory body — aiming to be to AI what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to global warming — was created in August.
Its first report is expected to be published in time for the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in July.
It aims to help governments discuss AI as the fast-evolving technology sparks global concern over job losses, misinformation and online abuse among other problems.
Guterres this month gave a list of experts he had proposed to serve on the UN’s AI panel.
They included journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and Canadian artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio.
“AI innovation is moving at the speed of light — outpacing our collective ability to fully understand it — let alone govern it,” Guterres said Friday.
“We are barrelling into the unknown.”
“Our goal is to make human control a technical reality — not a slogan,” he said.
“That requires meaningful human oversight in every high-stakes decision” and “requires clear accountability — so responsibility is never outsourced to an algorithm.”