Rapid spread of AI may worsen global inequality, UN warns

The UN panel said its approach to AI was ‘scientific, not political’. Photograph: VIEW press/Corbis/ View image in fullscreen The UN panel said its approach to AI was ‘scientific, not political’. The preliminary report also functions as a toolkit, offering initial, broad guidance to UN member states on ways to capitalize on AI’s potential for growth across industries, while minimizing and addressing threats. Suggestions include developing local AI infrastructure, such as datacenters, improving AI literacy in schools and the workforce, investing in developers, building AI safety institutes, creating strategies to combat disinformation and continuously measuring how AI systems behave after release, “with real users, real tasks and real environments”. While more than a billion people now use AI weekly, access and types of usage vary widely across the world, “with adoption across the global south lagging far behind the global north”, the report states. The US and China dominate in the development of leading AI models, as well as investment into compute infrastructure, which encompasses the hardware, memory, networking and storage required to run powerful AI models. “The concentration of AI capabilities in a small number of firms and countries could enable authoritarian capture and undermine democratic accountability,” the report states. The panel advises countries lagging behind in AI development to consider significant investment in computing and data infrastructure. Attracting this money requires securing a reliable energy supply and building datacenters, they note. The report does, however, acknowledge the environmental costs of datacenters, including their large energy and water consumption, and potential for greenhouse gas emissions. Trump accused of ‘disgusting’ crypto greed after earning over $1bn since return to office The authors also describe challenges in evaluating safety and providing oversight of increasingly powerful AI models. “Most countries, including many advanced economies, lack the technical expertise to assess the most capable ‘frontier’ models or to participate meaningfully in their governance,” they write. The panel of 40 independent scientific experts from across the world stated that this report is “the first of its kind”. The UN, they argue, “is the foremost global forum on transboundary risks of this scale” – and its approach is “scientific, not political”. Differences in language and internet access compound the digital divide. skip past promotion after promotion “Artificial intelligence leaves most languages behind,” the report notes. While generative AI tools perform well in English and other widely used languages, “most languages are either excluded or have much lower performance.” These disparities can have significant implications, particularly in a healthcare context.