UN warns against ‘irreversible impacts’

New York: The United Nations has warned against the perils of Artificial Intelligence achieving human-level features referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The United Nations Council of Presidents of the General Assembly (UNCPGA) sought in a report global coordination against the impact of AGI as it is to become a reality a few years from now.

While highlighting the benefit of AGI in many industries alongside accelerating ‘scientific discoveries in public health’, the report also pointed to the threats it will pose to humanity.

‘While AGI holds the potential to accelerate scientific discovery, advance public health, and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, it also poses unprecedented risks, including autonomous harmful actions and threats to global security,’ the report stated.

The report warned against ‘irreversible impacts’ AGI could cause autonomously unlike traditional AI.

AGI could execute ‘harmful actions beyond human oversight’ causing ‘threats from advanced weapon systems, and vulnerabilities in critical infrastructures. We must ensure these risks are mitigated if we want to reap the extraordinary benefits of AGI’.

Calling for coordinated action to prevent the technology becoming a menace, the UN report sought to discuss AGI’s benefits and risks alongside seeking to establish ‘a global AGI observatory, certification system for secure and trustworthy AGI, a UN Convention on AGI, and an international AGI agency’.

The UN’s warning comes after CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, said in February that AGI would arrive in the coming five or ten years, and pressed for a UN-like body to oversee the technology’s development.

‘I would advocate for a kind of CERN for AGI, and by that, I mean a kind of international research focused high-end collaboration on the frontiers of AGI development to try and make that as safe as possible,’ Hassabis was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, a research paper by DeepMind claimed that AGI, which is likely to arrive in 2030, could ‘permanently destroy humanity’.

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