The UN thinks AI can be a force for good—with the right rules

Even the diplomats and world leaders descending on Manhattan this week for the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly aren’t immune to the nonstop AI hype train.

At a tech-focused press event at the UN headquarters, Amandeep Singh Gill, the secretary general’s envoy on technology, said the office believes tech like AI can help achieve the UN’s ambitious Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.

Gill said the office plans to announce its AI advisory body next month; it will be tasked with identifying how the tech can help meet the SDGs while also outlining potential risks and fashioning recommendations for guardrails to rein in its worst tendencies.

The comments come as progress toward the SDGs has been decidedly sluggish since the UN first established the benchmarks in areas like education, climate change, and food insecurity in 2015.

“We are at the midpoint of agenda 2030, and we’ve fallen behind,” Gill said. “We need to catch up fast, and there is no way we can do that without leveraging technology responsibly.”

Global governance: UN Secretary General António Guterres said earlier this year that he believes the UN should create an international agency to govern AI in the same way it has done for other potentially dangerous technologies like nuclear energy, according to CNN.

Gill said that the advisory body would be the “first step” toward international AI governance.

“[The advisory body’s] task will be to map out the opportunities landscape—what is possible in which area of the SDGs? Its task will be to map out the risk landscape—what could go wrong?” Gill said. “These often start with good intentions to accelerate progress on the SDGs. But if it leads to the gender divide getting deeper or if it leads to a further drain on the planet's energy resources, then we will be going backwards, not forwards.”

As for how data and AI can be used for good, Gill mentioned examples like giving doctors better information on microbial resistance and a project called Farmer.CHAT, which uses generative AI to offer assistance to small-scale growers in countries like India, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

A “double-edged sword”: The Consumer Technology Association—the trade group behind CES—and the World Academy of Art and Sciences (WAAS) also announced at the event that they would be adding “technology” as the eighth pillar to their “Human Security for All” campaign, which seeks to further the SDGs.

The UN isn’t the only governing body seeking more information in hopes of corralling AI; the US Senate held the first of a series of nine planned AI forums last week with similar goals in mind.

WAAS President Garry Jacobs said the quest to regulate AI recalled the founding mission of his organization in 1960, when scientists felt they should play a bigger role in shaping policy after the Manhattan Project.

“Technology’s a double-edged sword,” Jacobs said. “Without regulation, without a partnership with the public, to see how we [can] use these things positively, we have problems in everything.”