(London) The United Kingdom brings together political leaders, technology representatives and researchers on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence (AI), during a first summit organized in response to fears aroused by this revolution technological.
Job destruction, cyberattacks or even loss of control by humans… Faced with the potential dangers of AI, the British government wants to open dialogue during this meeting in Milton Keynes, north of London, even if it seems to have revised its downward ambitions both on the participants and on the concrete measures expected.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has assured that he wants to achieve the “first international declaration on the nature” of the risks of AI and proposes the establishment of a group of international experts, inspired by the IPCC model on climate.
The British objective, at a minimum, is to achieve a “common understanding of the risks”, in the absence of a common policy: the European Union has chosen to regulate while London does not currently wish to regulate. In the United States, Joe Biden is due to announce on Monday a vast series of measures to regulate AI.
The location was not chosen by chance: Bletchley Park Manor is the iconic code-breaking center of the Second World War, where mathematician Alan Turing managed to “crack” the code of the Enigma machine used by the Nazis.
The British Alan Turing is also considered one of the fathers of AI thanks to his famous test, which consists of guessing whether a user is conversing with a computer or a human being.
From smartphones to airports, artificial intelligence is already omnipresent in daily life. Its progress has accelerated in recent years with the development of generative AI, such as the ChatGTP conversational robot. These “avant-garde” technologies are capable of producing text, sounds and images in the space of a few seconds.
The potential of AI raises enormous hopes, particularly for medicine, and “in 200 years, historians will have given a name to this period” of technological revolution, Aldo Faisal said at a press conference, professor of AI and neuroscience at Imperial College London.
But in addition to the destruction of thousands of jobs, the unbridled development of this technology could also be the cause of cyberattacks, disinformation, or even make it possible to “manufacture chemical or biological weapons,” worried Rishi Sunak.
“Missed opportunity”
At the initiative of this summit, the United Kingdom aims to be the driving force behind international cooperation on artificial intelligence. But it remains to be seen which heads of state will make the trip, in the midst of the war between Israel and Hamas.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres are expected. The United States will be represented by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the only G7 head of state or government to have confirmed her presence.
Despite tensions and fears of technological espionage, Beijing will be well represented, although we do not know exactly at what level, while according to the Politico website, Chinese President Xi Jinping in person has been invited.
Rishi Sunak said there could be no “serious strategy for AI without at least trying to involve all the major world powers”.
Around a hundred international organizations, experts and activists published an open letter to the British Prime Minister on Monday, calling this “closed-doors” summit a “missed opportunity” and accusing it of being dominated by technology giants.
This coalition of unions, academics and even human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International, also regretted the catastrophic approach of the British government, to the detriment of the threats that AI already represents “here and NOW “.
Among them, experts point to the lack of transparency of the models designed by companies, and their biases on race or gender.
For Hamed Haddadi, professor in the computer science department at Imperial College, the time has in any case come “to have this dialogue”: “Do we need regulation, or should we let the market and companies take care of it, and see what happens? “, he asked.