What I learned from the UN’s “AI for Good” summit

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What I learned from the UN’s “AI for Good” summit

By Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review | June 4, 2024

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The author just came back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN’s AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can be used to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

According the author, he didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Sage Lenier, a climate activist, talked about how we must not let AI accelerate environmental destruction. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, gave a compelling talk connecting the dots between our addiction to social media, the tech sector’s financial incentives, and our failure to learn from previous tech booms. And there are still deeply ingrained gender biases in tech, Mia Shah-Dand, the founder of Women in AI Ethics, reminded us. 

So while the conference itself was about using AI for “good,” I would have liked to see more talk about how increased transparency, accountability, and inclusion could make AI itself good from development to deployment.

We now know that generating one image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging a smartphone. The author liked to have a more honest conversations about how to make the technology more sustainable itself in order to meet climate goals. And it felt jarring to hear discussions about how AI can be used to help reduce inequalities when we know that so many of the AI systems we use are built on the backs of human content moderators in the Global South who sift through traumatizing content while being paid peanuts. 

Making the case for the “tremendous benefit” of AI was OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, the star speaker of the summit. Altman was interviewed remotely by Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, which has incidentally just announced a deal for OpenAI to share its content to train new AI models. OpenAI is the company that instigated the current AI boom, and it would have been a great opportunity to ask him about all these issues. Instead, the two had a relatively vague, high-level discussion about safety, leaving the audience none the wiser about what exactly OpenAI is doing to make their systems safer. It seemed they were simply supposed to take Altman’s word for it. 

When Thompson asked Altman what the first good thing to come out of generative AI will be, Altman mentioned productivity, citing examples such as software developers who can use AI tools to do their work much faster. The author thinks the jury is still out on that one. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. In the last week of May 2024, UN hosted AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can be used to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 
2. The attendees didn’t leave the conference feeling confident how AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite, including how we must not let AI accelerate environmental destruction; connection of the dots between our addiction to social media, the tech sector’s financial incentives, and our failure to learn from previous tech booms; and still deeply ingrained gender biases in tech. 
3. What the first good thing to come out of generative AI will be, Altman mentioned productivity, citing examples such as software developers who can use AI tools to do their work much faster.  The author thinks the jury is still out on that one. 

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Topics:  Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Sustainable Development Goals, Eradication of Poverty