China, at a two-day British summit has agreed to work with the United States, European Union and other countries to collectively manage the risks and concerns associated with artificial intelligence before the technology reaches its full potential.
The summit is an initiative of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who wants to carve out a post-Brexit role for his country as an intermediary between the economic blocs of the United States, China and the EU.
Chinese vice minister of science and technology, Wu Zhaohui, joined U.S. and EU leaders and tech gurus such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman of ChatGPT’s at Bletchley Park, home of Britain’s World War Two code-breakers, where more than 25 countries signed a “Bletchley Declaration” to establish a common approach on oversight.
British digital minister, Michelle Donelan explained that the move was born out of the desire to get so many key players in one room.
Just as tech firms rival for dominance in AI, governments and tech stakeholders and international institutions are designing regulation and charting a safe way forward for the rapidly evolving technology, having been warned that the rapid development of AI poses existential threats to humans and the earths if not controlled.
The declaration set out to achieve two agenda which include focusing on identifying the risks of shared concern and building scientific understanding of them, while also developing cross-country policies to mitigate them.
At the opening session Zhaohui told the summit that Beijing was ready to increase collaboration on AI safety to help build an international “governance framework” noting that countries regardless of their size and scale have equal rights to develop and use AI.
Public fears and concerns rose on the impacts AI could have on economies, politics, government and the general aspect of the society around November last year when Microsoft’s OpenAI made ChatGPT available, part of which is the fact that machines could in time achieve greater intelligence than humans, leading to unlimited and unintended consequences.
The European Union is focusing its AI oversight on data privacy, surveillance and their potential impact on human rights, while the British summit is looking to address existential risks from highly capable general-purpose models called “frontier AI”.
U.S. President Joe Biden availed the British summit to announce it would launch a U.S. AI Safety Institute having recently signed an executive order on AI.
At the “Bletchley Declaration” two further AI Safety Summits were announced; the South Korea and France summit six months and one year respectively.