About 150 government and industry leaders from around the world, including Vice President Kamala Harris and billionaire Elon Musk, descended on England this week for the U.K.’s AI Safety Summit. The meeting acted as the focal point for a global conversation about how to regulate artificial intelligence. But for some experts, it also highlighted the outsize role that AI companies are playing in that conversation—at the expense of many who stand to be affected but lack a financial stake in AI’s success.
On November 1 representatives from 28 countries and the European Union signed a pact called the Bletchley Declaration (named after the summit’s venue, Bletchley Park in Bletchley, England), in which they agreed to keep deliberating on how to safely deploy AI. But for one in 10 of the forum’s participants, many of whom represented civil society organizations, the conversation taking place in the U.K. hasn’t been good enough.
Following the Bletchley Declaration, 11 organizations in attendance released an open letter saying that the summit was doing a disservice to the world by focusing on future potential risks—such as the terrorists or cybercriminals co-opting generative AI or the more science-fictional idea that AI could become sentient, wriggle free of human control and enslave us all. The letter said the summit overlooked the already real and present risks of AI, including discrimination, economic displacement, exploitation and other kinds of bias.
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