The United Nations Wants to Treat AI With the Same Urgency as Climate Change [Video]

The hands-off approach adopted by the US government has led California to propose its own AI rules. Earlier versions of these regulations were criticized by AI companies based there as too onerous, for example in how they would require firms to report their activities to the government, resulting in the rules being watered down.

Meltzer adds that AI is evolving at such a rapid pace that the UN will not be able to manage global cooperation alone. “There is clearly an important role for the UN when it comes to AI governance, but it needs to be part of a distributed kind of architecture,” with individual nations also working on it directly, he says. “You’ve got a fast-evolving technology, and the UN is clearly not set up to handle that.”

The UN report seeks to establish common ground between member states by emphasizing the importance of human rights. “Anchoring the …