06/05/2023

How the World Must Respond to the AI Revolution

Insights from Ian Bremmer, the president of Eurasia Group

The now-surging development of artificial intelligence will produce medical breakthroughs that save and enhance billions of lives. It will become the most powerful engine for prosperity in history. It will give untold numbers of people, including generations not yet born, powerful tools their ancestors never imagined. But the risks and challenges AI will pose are becoming clear, too, and now is the time to understand and address them. Here are the biggest.

The health of democracy and free markets depends on access to accurate and verifiable information. In recent years, social media has made it tougher to tell fact from fiction, but advances in AI will unleash legions of bots that seem far more human than those we've encountered to date. Much more sophisticated audio and video deep fakes will undermine our (already diminished) confidence in those who serve in government and those who report the news. In China, and later in its client states, AI will take facial recognition and other tools that can be used for state surveillance to exponentially higher levels of sophistication.

This problem extends beyond our institutions, because the production of "generative AI," artificial intelligence that generates sophisticated written, visual and other content in response to prompts from users, isn’t limited to big tech companies. Anyone with a laptop and basic programming skills already has access to AI models far more powerful than those that existed even a few months ago and can produce unprecedented volumes of content. This proliferation challenge is about to grow exponentially as millions of people will have their own GPT running on real-time data available on the internet. The AI revolution will empower criminals, terrorists and other bad actors to code malware, create bioweapons, manipulate financial markets and distort public opinion with startling ease.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.