Quintin Chou-Lambert
AI Lead, United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies
The widespread influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape social roles, work dynamics, governance and global equity. Unclear trends highlight the urgent need for fore-sight and flexible, adaptive governance.
AI inequality vs AI inclusion
We are still in the early stages of AI’s global spread. One scenario envisions AI amplifying existing patterns, including inequalities. The concentration of AI development in a few countries and companies echoes the recent history of the internet. Accelerated scientific progress and productivity gains could accrue sooner for those already at the forefront of AI development and adoption, widening existing gaps and deepening power imbalances.
However, cheaper and more accessible AI technologies could also spread globally, shaping many different aspects of life. Already, AI is being used to help draft laws, diagnose diseases and support learners around the world. Risks also lurk in such productive applications, from reinforced biases to misleading diagnoses and cognitive passivity. Opportunities and risks will be amplified by technology’s spread.
Both these scenarios could happen in parallel, with AI concentration accompanied by AI mushrooming. What seems clear is that AI’s expanding development, deployment and use will continue to expand across borders, fuelled by investment, optimism and anxiety.
New AI-related industries are
emerging, just as existing ones
accelerate, scale and automate.
Destabilising existing orders
Physicist and computer scientist John Von Neumann argued that such technological expansion destabilises existing orders, testing the limits of geography, existing relationships and political organisations with a cascading wave of technology-charged change.
New AI-related industries are emerging, just as existing ones accelerate, scale and automate. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that 40% of global employment is exposed to AI, implying many winners and losers. The societal impacts of such shifts, and many others, will also unfold amidst geoeconomic and geopolitical competition over AI’s supposed ability to boost countries’ wealth and power.
Many of these implications can be addressed at the company or national level. Yet, AI’s data inputs, deployments and spillovers cross borders, calling for international cooperation.
The role of international cooperation
Given the inherent uncertainty over when and how such dynamics will evolve, Von Neumann posited that only day-to-day, or perhaps year-to-year, opportunistic measures could ensure human survival and flourishing: ‘a long sequence of small, correct decisions.’
This year, the United Nations is set to establish an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and a Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Such measures will promote scientific understanding of AI’s risks, opportunities and impacts to support more effective AI policymaking and help countries collaborate on how they are governing AI. It will also consider financing options for AI capacity-building.
AI may be a powerful technology, but it is human patience, flexibility and intelligence that remain our best hope for navigating the global expansion of AI for the common good.
