World leaders diverge on AI at UN General Assembly
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UNITED NATIONS -- It's killer robots versus super intelligence.
Visions of the future straight out of comic books are playing out at the United Nations as world leaders talk about the threat -- or promise -- of artificial intelligence.
Once again it was Donald Trump against the U.N, chief and other leaders on a pressing issue involving science and the future, echoing ongoing disputes over the threat of climate change.
Armed with a new U.N. science report that warns of a slight but real potential of catastrophic and irreversible harm, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres kicked off the parade of world leaders speaking at the General Assembly by calling for more oversight of AI, warning in vivid if not ominous terms of what could go wrong.
"Let us resolve that life-and-death decisions must never be surrendered to machines. Killer robots must have no place in our future," Guterres said in his farewell address to world leaders. He also warned about AI in his first General Assembly address a decade ago.
With Guterres saying the world needs to "advance the conditions for the responsible pacing of AI and the additional safeguards needed to address risks," the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday will address how to place some kind of controls on the technology and it will feature some of the biggest names in the field.
Super, not artificial, Trump says
Less than an hour later, Trump was having none of that. "The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much. Now here and after officially called super intelligence, changing the name," he said.
World leaders speaking after Trump used "artificial intelligence" -- not "super."
"Every major new technology brings challenges, and superintelligence is no exception," Trump said. "Yet the very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change, because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead. These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is going to be a total disaster."
Trump was referring to a 2018 UN report that outlined the danger of human-caused climate change for long-term breaching of the internationally agreed-upon threshold of 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit of warming since pre-industrial time and said it was 12 years away.
Studies now say that breach is imminent in the next few years. That report -- along with other science documents -- did not say everyone would die. It said extreme weather would get more dangerous and that reducing pollution could prevent 100 million premature deaths over the next 82 years.
Also, the world has not cooled, but warmed 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 12 years, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Go slow but cooperate, others say
The problem is both Trump and Guterres reduce the issue to something that's not useful, says University of Chicago computer science department chairman Henry Hoffmann.
"One turns it into a science-fiction movie; the other turns it into a nonissue," Hoffmann said in an email. "Both push people to pick a team instead of engaging with the real risks and the possible mitigations. There shouldn't be 'sides' on whether we need adequate control over powerful autonomous systems. The interesting debate is over what mechanisms actually provide that control."