AI systems could disrupt essential services and weaken safeguards against weapons of mass destruction.
On Monday, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned that the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) threatens the rights to life, food, privacy, health, and security.
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“The current race toward increasingly powerful AI represents a qualitative leap toward greater existential risks for all aspects of our lives,” he said after employees in the technology sector urged that the advancement of the technology be slowed.
Agentic AI, which goes beyond conventional AI and can make its own decisions, is showing failures that “could paralyze essential services, fracture communications, destabilize critical infrastructure and strike at the very heart of democratic institutions,” Türk warned.
“Entire populations could be left without access to water, heating or financial services,” the high commissioner added, assuring that AI “is already accelerating the pace of wars, expanding their reach and eroding the safeguards that stand between us and the launching of weapons of mass destruction.”
Anthropic’s CEO and other AI researchers are warning that increasingly capable systems could pose existential risks if development outpaces safety measures, but experts remain divided over how likely such scenarios are. Read more
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His warnings come after figures such as Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic; OpenAI director Sam Altman; and billionaire Elon Musk called for deliberately slowing the pace of development of the most advanced AI models in response to risks such as losing control over the systems.
According to Türk, states and companies must urgently mobilize through multilateral forums to govern AI on the basis of international law and human rights.
“No country can govern this technology on its own, no company should be able to decide on its own what risks the world should accept, and no person should be forced to give up their human rights in exchange for promises of technological progress,” the Austrian high commissioner said in summary.
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Source: EFE
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