Artificial intelligence has come into prominence in the public imagination with the emergence of generative AI tools such as chat GPT,
but it's highly likely that some areas of AI development will disappoint and underwhelm, so it won't live up to the hype.
But developments in other areas are likely to positively surprise,
and the direction of travel for this technology is remarkably exponential in innovation.
So we can see already that AI has huge potential.
But we can also see that AI has real risks and downsides.
As a general purpose technology, AI has been likened by some to the harnessing of electricity in the past,
can be used for many different things to enable many different things.
The uses and influence of AI will likely impact on every aspect of human life.
How we communicate, how we learn, our livelihoods, the economy and the environment.
It will also have implications for peace and security, good and bad, and for all of us seeking a more peaceful and just world.
So I have just under 20 minutes to introduce the key issues.
Uh, and I hope we can then discuss them in more detail in the Q&A and in this afternoon's breakout sessions.
So I'm going to touch briefly on the risks of AI, the way the UN and other organisations are seeking to govern these risks,
and then specific ways that I might support those working in international peace and security.
My starting point is Unesco was the first international organisation to agree ethical principles for AI,
and it's almost a useful cheat sheet for thinking of the issue areas for the challenges AI presents.
So the Unesco principles cover the areas of respect for human rights, transparency,
accountability, justice and fairness, non-discrimination and equality,
privacy and data promotion, participation and inclusivity, safety and security, sustainability and the promotion of peace.
So very much the themes of all of this conference today, and AI in a way, is also a new actor coming onto the scene.
That's not a human or institutional actor. So I'll go into some of these Unesco ish areas.
First is the bias from AI algorithms, the design of algorithms, the data that they're trained on and the use to which they're put perpetuates.
We've seen or intensifies existing prejudices and discrimination and can introduce new ones against disabled people,
older people, young people all around ethnicity, women and LGBTQ persons.
This can increase inequalities, exacerbate social tensions and conflict.
A second areas climate change. Effects of AI from training and testing large language models requires a huge amount of electricity use, uh,
as a climate change effect from mining the minerals that wear a material sense, and elements that go into making semiconductor chips.
The AI is trained on.
And in the use of AI, we're likely to see over the next year or two, a huge increase in the automation of processes linking AI software,
um, to, to to other bits of, um, software and computers through, uh, what are called APIs.
And quite soon I think we'll have tens of millions of agents.
That's kind of AI bots working on our behalf while we sleep,
or while we do other tasks like negotiating with people to buy things for us and arranging our travel and,
and our holiday or whatever itinerary and so on.
So this can be a huge amount of increased electricity use in the background above what we've got already.
But AI models can also hugely help in climate change forecasting.
The better use of of land um a for biodiversity, climate or food security, the discovery of new materials,
nanotechnology, plastics alternatives, new renewable technologies to help in the green transition to a circular economy.
So it'll be a trade off between huge increased electricity use and smart solutions.
On the other side, next is a risk of misuse.
Bad actors being organised, crime terror groups or state actors weaponizing AI for misinformation and disinformation.
We've seen how it can exacerbate ethnic.
Divisions in society influence elections through deepfake videos,
discourage voting by personalised messaging targeting human rights defenders or political opponents.
This area of privacy and mass surveillance risks on this area of military applications.
So that's AI and nuclear guidance and other weapon systems.
The development and deployment of lethal autonomous weapon systems, uh, without any human, um, input in there.
And that killing the AI in combination with biological or chemical weapons, allowing someone to develop these in their own kitchen.
Seventh is the geopolitics of AI and the risk of an AI arms race,
including trade wars over semiconductor chips and the use of AI in conflict, such as through drone technology.
Then there's the risk of what's called, um, AGI, um, where we're talking about artificial general intelligence.
I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but we hear we hear about it from time to time in the media,
the risk of AI becoming smarter than us and no longer aligned with human values and interests.
And I think that is a really, uh, worthwhile area to look at.
But there's some risks with it.
And one of the key risks is distracting away from the immediate problems the AI produces, such as, uh, discrimination and the climate change risk.
And there's also a risk, not that I will become too smart,
but there's a risk that we spend billions on branches of AI that remain too stupid or inaccurate to be of value,
and the wasted opportunity cost of that money and that talent involved.
Ninth AI safety risk. This is what the Bletchley summit last autumn was with about some safety.
But risks are hard to predict. Uh, they may arise from the technology itself some day.
Likened trying to develop standards for AI to keep it safe when I was innovating so rapidly,
likened it to trying to set design standards for a car when the car is still in motion.
I think it's really hard when where you develop standards on the next day the model has innovated,
and to such a degree that that standard is no longer relevant.
And lastly, the risks of widening the digital divide both between and within countries.
So it's that compute kind of computational, um, the hardware on which we can test these,
um, uh, these large language models, um, is largely clustered in particular countries.
And the talent in designing algorithms, it's also this may well change but is clustered around particular countries.
The real two AI superpowers are the US and China.
But there's also emerging clusters in other Western companies in Japan, Korea, Singapore, also in, in uh, Saudi Arabia, UAE.
And lastly, it's largely it's been developed largely in the private sector with all the profit incentives that entails.
So the implications of this of, of this kind of clustering of, of compute power in particular countries is that the design of the model,
a model which is going to influence every aspect of our life,
reflects the world view of what a good, a good life looks like from the perspective of a narrow set of countries,
and possibly even the narrow set of young male, often white programmers who are designing a lot of these things.
And also they use cases which are prioritised and not necessarily those of the poorest billion.
I believe that to be robust and legitimate global, I must benefit from inputs from a wide range of cultural and epistemological perspectives,
including the equal contribution of women and learning from indigenous people's knowledge,
which often has a very small or non-existent digital footprint.
But creating global AI from different cultures also presents challenges over values,
especially regarding women and LGBTQi approaches within the Global South.
Being more conservative another way and exacerbates the digital divide,
especially with the least developed African countries, is that AI rests on a pyramid of electricity access.
Sometimes it's non-existent in rural parts of countries.
Then you need on top of that, um, uh, and tricity, um, uh, you need ICT, you need computers, smartphones.
You then need connectivity through Wi-Fi and only the top of the pyramid can you, can you then have running, running, uh, AI algorithms?
Um, this can change over time. But, uh, it means that, uh, that there is a real risk of exacerbating the existing digital divide.
Women often have less access to computers in the developing world and less access to smartphones,
so their data is less likely to be used to train and refine AI models because those models pick up data from social media and elsewhere.
So it's another way which skews away from a kind of universal AI.
In a way, I think there's an analogy with medicine where medicine, first of all,
was that drugs were designed primarily on on the male body and then found later
that actually women's bodies were different and therefore medicine didn't,
didn't kind of have the same effects. And so I think there's a real risk with AI being designed in a similar way.
And the governance of AI risks not being informed by the perspectives of those countries in, uh, in international fora.
I worked a bit with the Simon Institute last year in the permanent missions of,
of Kenya and Costa Rica at the UN in Geneva to try and train the cadre of diplomats from the global South in understanding AI governance issues.
Diplo Foundation in Geneva was doing a lot in African capitals.
Um, the International International Science Council is curating regional networks of scientists and social scientists and in,
in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Asia Pacific.
So solutions. Well, I want to talk about, um, a governance of AI.
And then lastly peace and security areas.
Governance of AI is likely to happen in a patchwork way, partly because its dual use as military implications.
So countries are, um, cautious about what they share with other countries,
and also because we're increasingly living as well as we had earlier today in a multipolar world.
Most regulations, therefore, are likely to happen at national level or at a regional level, like the the recent EU AI act,
but guided by international principles as well as a patchwork of bilateral trust building dialogues,
for example, between the US and China, very much against the nuclear, um, weapons domain.
So what's been happening to us? Well, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is the first Secretary-General with a science and engineering background.
So this has been a real passion for him. He set up a high level advisory board on AI, which had an interim report,
already talked about the areas of need, not the solutions, but it will report this July.
And where I think it's probably going to land is recommendations on creating new international AI models modelled on uh,
institutions in other domains. In particular, three have been talked about a lot.
The role of the IAEA in both capacity building for for civil nuclear power, but also in monitoring and enforcement.
In this case, it would be of AI risks. Secondly, the IPCC on climate.
So how do we create a mechanism where we collaboratively across researchers,
scientists and government officials, uh, can can track this fast moving in innovative um, uh, developments.
And it how the International Civil Aviation Organisation is perhaps a good example of how a green standards at an international
level on aviation safety and interoperability can then be implemented at a national level in conjunction with the private sector,
then the UN General Assembly, uh, which is building towards a summit to the future in September of this year,
which will include agreement on a global digital compact with AI at its heart.
And those negotiations are being led by Sweden and Zambia.
Unesco and the OECD have designed ethical principles, and we need to integrate those principles at every point in the AI lifecycle.
So that's in the design, the training, the testing, the deployment and the use of AI.
Then we have standard setting in the International Telecommunications Union next week, uh,
I and some other colleagues from Oxford will be going to help organise an AI governance day at the ITU in Geneva.
Then there's international standards organisations come up with two standards on AI and the IEEE, a technical body.
We've had the first meeting of the UN Security Council under UK auspices.
Our foreign minister spoke at it on AI and Peace and Security in July last year.
At that meeting, the Secretary general pointed to the preamble of the UN charter, which says determined we,
the peoples of the world determined to end the scourge of war, um, and determined to save succeeding generations from.
On the sculpture floor. And he used those words, succeeding generations as almost a mandate for the UN to work on this issue,
because unless we have the interests of future generations,
and we recognise the impact that technology is going to have on the path for humanity,
we're not going to serve them well or prevent, uh, war in the future.
Then there's lethal autonomous weapons. The Argentinean ambassador in Geneva has been presiding over those negotiations in Geneva.
This this US, China dialogues I mentioned two months ago.
The US piloted in actually a very inclusive way.
And the omnibus UN General Assembly resolution on AI, it was co-signed um by uh, uh, co-sponsored by over 130 countries, including, crucially, China.
And at this moment, China's consulting on a follow up resolution on capacity building for developing countries on AI in, uh, the developing world.
We've had the UN Bletchley meeting on AI safety follow up next week in Republic of Korea and France in six months.
So the six months rather than every 2 or 3 years, because the technology's moving.
Um, so, uh, so fast. It's a good example of a mini lateral that included China.
China is very concerned about it being excluded from bodies like the OECD and others that make up AI principles.
So it's, uh, um, pioneering its own AI governance initiative, a global one,
and looking at digital Belt and Road, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the BRICs, plus working groups on AI.
So quickly I to have a couple of regional, um, uh, initiatives and then and with the use of AI for conflict prevention,
mediation and peace building, I mentioned the EU AI act focussed on privacy, intellectual property and trade.
There's been an African Union continental um wide strategy being negotiated, um, in Addis Ababa.
But in fact, the real pioneers have been at a national level, particularly in Kenya, uh,
where and uh, um, um, Mauritius, um, uh, uh, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa, in Latin America,
there was a declaration, uh, agreed in Chile among those countries, um, uh, but uh, but very little,
uh, work so far, individual countries like Brazil were plotting national legislation.
We've had working groups with the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council,
and I believe Saudi Arabia and the UAE are kind of really big actors in this space.
Um, and then we've had ACM ethical principles.
I know from talking over lunch, a number of you work in Southeast Asia. I think Asean is going to be a very powerful actor.
Uh, in the AI space, Singapore floats in its own generative AI international principles that it's seeking global buy in for it.
And Malaysia, who has the chair of Asean in 2025 and then Philippines a year after both looking to advance Asean institutions while they're there?
We should also not forget, um, Central Asia.
The Kazakhstan president is passionate about about AI, and I think we'll probably use CSA to to take it forward.
That kind of his conference on on confidence building and in Central Asia and then the
Pacific Forum countries that are too small to be able to really develop their own,
uh, large language model capability, but they face existential extinction from climate change.
And so looking at climate change as some way to, to help with that.
So to end the use of AI for conflict prevention, mediation and peacebuilding, some of these are happening now.
Some are actually very hard to implement because of mistrust or technological barriers.
So we've already seen a huge increase in the use of AI and data sets by the UN's
Department of Peacebuilding and Political Affairs and the Department of Peace Operations.
So this is use in conflict, uh, prediction, real time monitoring of conflict and human rights abuses and monitoring of ceasefires.
There's a potential for. But I haven't seen evidence of use in monitoring of disarmament and non-proliferation commitments.
Then this a peace building area. I could potentially help us better understand the causes of conflict for multiple angles,
including, you know, an area that the UN had had a blind spot for many years,
the economic drivers of conflict, but also other causes that have been neglected by our existing institutions.
AI tools can help detect and mitigate cyber threats.
It can magnify the voices of marginalised groups. So the Department of our Peace Operations, um,
the trials of large digital dialogues through African peacekeeping missions and particularly targeting and hearing the voices of women and minorities.
In the conversation. But in order to make that happen,
we're also seeing the attempts to develop privacy tools through AI to allow
large canvassing of views in sensitive settings while preserving anonymity.
Then we've got programs on using AI in mediation with the centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva.
Work done by the new NGO, AI for peace.
But AI is a mediation pathway solution provider, uh, could possibly be very helpful for a mediator,
but also that there'll be great concerns about what happens within the black box where we don't
really know who's pulling the strings inside or whether it's been being hacked in some way.
Uh, I've been in some negotiations with, with, with, um,
different foreign ministries in the South and north on use of AI tools to reduce asymmetry in negotiations.
So a country like Palau, which has a tiny foreign ministry,
could use AI to basically synthesise the whole negotiating position of the US or China on climate change or on other, other, other issues.
Right. Speeches for ministers, etc., etc. So there's real potential to reduce asymmetry,
but still there's real concern among those foreign ministries around information security, um, and bias.
And the last two points would be AI language tools.
Simultaneous translation in real time is now here.
Uh, no longer need to take a dictionary with you when you go on a holiday. You could literally speak into your phone and it will, uh,
speak in the other language and it will translate back almost, um, with a high degree of accuracy.
So I think encouraging intercultural understanding of younger people is one valuable thing.
And the potential to tap into the demographic demographic dividend of, of the African continent,
India and other areas with which are growing and have huge pool of talent in the design of AI, is important for the future.
The biggest boon for peace, I think, is perhaps in the economic prosperity boost of AI.
There's a potential in both the global North and the global South of lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and through efficiencies in the West,
could release more funds to meet climate change finance promises and transform, um, financing.
Um, but that won't happen unless I think all of us working in every field, um,
speak out about the absolute need for AI to be infused with universal values of equity, fairness, transparency, and always having a human in the loop.
Um, for for AI decisions.
So I've left so many things out I'd like to talk about, but I've stuck to that to keep within my my time and look forward to Q&A and discussion later.
Thank you very much.