The UN’s independent scientific panel on artificial intelligence on Wednesday, July 1, stressed the need for a shared global body of evidence on the technology, saying science and compassion should guide efforts to understand AI’s benefits and risks as governments weigh how to govern its rapid development.

Panel co-chairs Yoshua Bengio and Maria Ressa said during a briefing led by UN Secretary-General António Guterres that a common knowledge base was needed to support evidence-driven policymaking on AI.

This evolving, shared knowledge base aims to help policymakers turn science into shared action.

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As Guterres noted in his opening speech at the preliminary report briefing, “The more AI advances without shared rules, the less say governments and people will have in the outcome.”

The panel’s preliminary report, Ressa said, “is the best available evidence, at this moment, in a field that changes faster than any of us can write about it. The numbers we report run through May — and in this field, that already feels like a while ago.”

Bengio meanwhile said that the growing power of AI “can unlock great benefits if we act wisely, but it can also lead to many perils if some are reckless or seek to abuse the power of AI while most of us remain passive.”

Bengio went on to say that “the decisions made about AI today will have lasting consequences for individuals, businesses, institutions, and even democracy at large,” but that “science and compassion must remain our compass, and humanity must make sure to avoid being pushed off course by the commercial or geopolitical winds that can blow strong from many sides”

Ressa added that while a future with AI holds many risks and opportunities, that future isn’t determined yet. “The single most surprising thing I learned on this Panel was this: the hardest part was not the differences between nations. Scientists from every region — across every divide you can imagine — looked at the same evidence and arrived at the same place. Science gave us a common language that politics often cannot,” she explained.

Ressa added, “If forty of us — strangers in February — can hold that line together, then governments can too. The window to act is open. This report is the common ground to act from.”

Societal attention, investment in academic research

When asked about what might be needed to help increase the evidence base so policymakers can make better decisions, Bengio explained that more societal attention, not just in media, but also in terms of investment into independent study into the impacts of AI, could help.

Bengio said, “Right now, most of the money in AI is in private hands, and the interest in what is necessary… that may be a different goal. It’s something that public organizations like universities have a long tradition of investigating.”

Ressa meanwhile outlined three things that could aid in the endeavor.

Independent measurement access was one aspect. “Right now, the people who can see how the systems behave in the real world are the developers and everyone else gets what they choose to share. Give official statisticians and independent evaluators privacy-preserving access and you can finally measure the economic and labor effects instead of forecasting across an order of magnitude,” she said.

Second, Ressa mentioned standardized reporting on the environment, meaning a common standard for reporting on environmental issues, such as determining energy and water footprints, in the age of AI.

Ressa also cited the third aspect, which is capacity or the ability to do this scientific measuring. Said Ressa, “It has to exist outside the handful of countries where AI is built or the evidence base stays as concentrated as the technology.”

The preliminary report by the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence serves as a baseline and starting point, and should not be seen as the last word on the matter of AI’s effects. – Rappler.com