The weaponisation of artificial intelligence poses a “serious danger” to the world, according to UN Secretary General António Guterres.
Addressing a technology summit in Portugal this week, Guterres said that the weaponisation of artificial intelligence has led to the prospect of autonomous weapons that can select and destroy targets, adding that such advances “will make it very difficult to avoid escalation of conflicts and to guarantee the respect of international humanitarian law and international human rights law”.
“Machines that have the power and the discretion to take human lives are politically unacceptable, are morally repugnant and should be banned by international law,” he said.
Guterres called for new platforms to be created to address such issues, adding that he wanted the UN to be a platform where various groups can come together to discuss protocols and other mechanisms that allow for cyberspace, the internet and AI “to be essentially a force for good.”
Guterres also told the three day Web Summit that technological advances were happening at “warp speed” and pointed out that “90 per cent of the data that exists today in the world was created in the two last years”.
He added that cutting speed technology was essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and cited examples of the ways in which UN agencies are already leveraging new technologies.
