Beverley Rannow: How the U.S., Russia jointly undermined global AI weapon safeguards
"The United States should be leading to force all countries to have strict ethical rules of engagement and multiple reviews before raining down death upon hundreds, thousands, millions of, for the most part, innocent people," columnist Beverley Rannow writes.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not of Ottawa News Network.
With tech executives warning of the dangers of AI that could cause millions of deaths, the United States met with Russia behind closed doors at a September meeting to strip key human-oversight and ethics safeguards out of a draft of a UN non-binding agreement regulating autonomous AI weapons.
Specifically, the American and Russian delegations spent roughly 15 hours in Geneva during a closed-door, camera-off session to rewrite portions of a non-binding UN agreement. The delegations removed text requiring artificial intelligence weapons to operate in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner, stripped out clauses on ethical considerations and deleted rules mandating human review of AI-generated targets prior to a military strike.
This should be widely reported and is evidence of the threat that President Trump and Republicans pose to Americans and the entire global community. This is outrageous and makes the world even more unstable and unsafe. The entirety of Congress should be speaking out loudly about this egregious act!
The United States should be leading to force all countries to have strict ethical rules of engagement and multiple reviews before raining down death upon hundreds, thousands, millions of, for the most part, innocent people. Do you want your family wiped out by indiscriminate weapons? Were the use of nuclear weapons not enough to deter us from the use of war to solve problems?
— Beverley Rannow resides in Holland.
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