In an open letter sent to governments and sector companies, Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for “urgent action” to frame AI systems and research in this field.
The UN High Commissioner lamented that we are currently almost entirely dependent on a small number of powerful companies to make the right choices in AI development for all humanity. According to the High Commissioner, all human rights are threatened by this technology, including the rights to life and to food, to privacy, to health and to safety.
He pointed to agentic AI, this autonomous AI, a system capable of planning, executing and adjusting sequences of complex operations that can progress on its own, with the risk that it makes decisions that could kill human beings.
“Whole populations could find themselves deprived of drinking water, heating and financial services. Agentic AI is already accelerating the pace and scale of armed conflicts, while eroding the safeguards that separate us from the deployment of weapons of mass destruction,” he warned.
This passage probably refers to the Gaza war where AI determined the targets that the Israeli army would destroy, without taking into account the civilian victims that this could entail and sometimes classifying as terrorists and dangerous people according to questionable criteria.
Türk’s letter is addressed primarily to the United States and China, the main AI developers are in China and the United States. He ends his missive with this conclusion: “No country can regulate this technology alone. No company should be able to decide alone the risks the world must accept.”
It seems Beijing is aware of the problem. China’s intelligence chief, State Security Minister Chen Yixin, warned on Sunday that AI was likely to threaten national security, with foreign powers possibly using this technology to destabilize a country.
The heads of Anthropic and OpenAI, American AI leaders, have been called into question by an engineer who resigned in early September, accusing them of endangering humanity with an intelligence capable of self-management and self-improvement.
