For over a century and a half, Mention as “most important” agency never heard ofhas globalized technology.
With its latest revision as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), its global regulations now underpin most of the technology we use in our daily lives, with television, satellite, mobile phones and internet connections coming from Japan. We are setting technical standards that allow us to operate seamlessly all the way to Brazil.
The next big technology may present organizations with their biggest challenges yet. Artificial intelligence systems are being deployed around the world at a dizzying pace, impacting nearly every industry, from education and healthcare to law enforcement and defense. Governments around the world are scrambling to balance profit and bogey, putting in place guardrails to keep them on board the ship of technological change. The ITU, with its 193 member states and hundreds of companies and organizations, is trying to manage this tumultuous conversation.
“Despite the 158th anniversary of the founding of the ITU, I believe that the mission and mandate of the ITU has never been more important than it is today,” ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan Martin said in a recent interview.
Founded in Paris in 1865. International Telegraph Union The ITU has been tasked with creating global standards for telegraphic messages sent between nations without having to hard-code them into national systems at national borders, and later on future technologies such as telephones and radio. will continue to play the role of In 1932, the agency was incorporated into the framework of radio governance establishing maritime distress signals such as SOS, adopted its present name to reflect its ever-expanding powers, and in 1947 came under the protection of the United Nations. He was taken.
Bogdan Martin, who took office in January, is the first woman and second American to head the ITU. To reach this goal, she spent months campaigning to defeat her opponent, a former Russian communications official who also served on the board of Chinese tech company Huawei. Wide billed as a fight for future of internet, Needless to say, it is an important bulwark for the West in the face of increasingly assertive China and Russia in the United Nations. took over the ITU leadership from Mr.
“It was intense,” admitted Bogdan-Martin.After all, she won It won 139 out of 172 votes.
Russia and China are at the forefront of competing internet visions, with each country exerting greater control over what its citizens can see online. Both countries already have that control domestically, and Russia has used the Ukraine war to further restrict internet access, digital iron curtain It is a step closer to China’s much more advanced censorship device, the Great Firewall.and Joint statement Last February, the two countries said that “any attempt to regulate domestic segments of the Internet and limit their sovereign right to secure them is unacceptable,” citing the ITU’s ITU to address global Internet governance issues. He called for “further participation.”
“I am a firm supporter of a free, open and democratic internet,” said Bogdan-Martin. These values are key to her biggest priority for the ITU: bringing internet to her 2.9 billion people worldwide who have not yet experienced it. “Secure, affordable, reliable, responsible and meaningful connectivity is a global imperative,” she said.
Getting that level of global agreement on how to regulate artificial intelligence may not be so easy. Governments around the world are adopting different approaches, not necessarily compatible. While the European Union’s AI law, which is expected to be finalized later this year, ranks AI applications by level of risk and potential harm, China’s regulations target specific AI applications, and development are required to submit information about the algorithms to the government. The U.S. lags even further when it comes to binding legislation, but so far has focused on lighter regulation and more voluntary frameworks aimed at allowing innovation to thrive.
But in recent weeks, there has been growing demand for a global AI regulator modeled on the nuclear non-proliferation framework administered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Proponents of the idea include UN Secretary-General António Guterres and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose sophisticated chatbots have sparked a lot of work around the technology. But some experts argue that comparisons with nuclear weapons do not fully capture the challenges of artificial intelligence.
“People forget how harmonious there was between the two. [five permanent members of the Security Council] The United Nations should be held accountable rather than the IAEA,” said Robert Traeger, director of international governance at the nonprofit Center for AI Governance. When it comes to recent AI regulation, these members said, “The degree of harmonization of interests is not the same, which is a challenge.”
Another difference is that AI technology has a much wider range of applications, potentially transforming nearly every aspect of the global economy, for better or worse. “It’s going to change the nature of our interactions on all fronts. We’re going to really approach this and say, ‘Oh, there’s this thing called AI, we had to regulate cars and oil production and all that. We can’t just say, ‘We have to find a way to regulate AI in the same way,'” said Gillian Hadfield. He is a Law Professor at the University of Toronto, studying AI regulation. “It’s going to really change how everything works.”
The pace of AI development is so fast that things are not so easy for would-be regulators. After the launch of ChatGPT rocked the global AI landscape, its maker OpenAI launched GPT-4, a new version of the software engine that powers chatbots that can incorporate not only text but also images. It took less than six months to launch. . “For example, one of the things we’re seeing with the EU AI law is that it hasn’t even been passed yet and is already struggling to keep up with the state of the art,” Hadfield said. .
But Bogdan-Martin is trying to get the ball rolling. The ITU held its sixth annual AI for Good global summit last week, bringing together policy makers, experts, industry executives, robot Over two days, we will discuss how AI can help and harm humanity, with a focus on the guardrails that mitigate the latter. Solutions proposed at the summit included a global registry of AI applications and a global AI observatory.
“Things are moving very fast,” said Bogdan Martin. “Every day, every week, we hear new things,” she said. “But we cannot be complacent about the status quo. We need to be proactive and find ways to meet the challenges.”
And while it may be difficult to reach full agreement, there are some fundamental risks to AI, and experts say countries, regardless of ideology, should form some sort of baseline, such as child protection. He said he would be keen to mitigate that because it could.
“No jurisdiction or state has an interest in private entities that do things that are dangerous to society,” Traeger said. “There is a common interest, and I think there is, to develop the regime and find out what the best standards are.”‘There are many opportunities for collaboration. “
