New UN initiative will aim to tackle the military uses of AI

The United Nations is launching a new initiative on the military uses of artificial intelligence, aimed at addressing some dire concerns about the threat the rapidly developing technology could pose to humanity.The initiative by the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research plans to launch Thursday, establishing the first international forum for key players to try to tackle the issue.Robin Geiss, head of the Geneva-based institute known as UNIDIR, warned at a U.N. press conference Tuesday that “the margin for human judgment is increasingly narrow, including in the nuclear domain.”It’s difficult to assess how close the world is to machines possibly acting outside of human control, Geiss said, and that uncertainty “is the issue we’re trying to resolve here.”One problem is that AI is increasingly creeping into so many areas — early warning systems, information gathering and reconnaissance, to name a few — “and it’s quite difficult to say at which point we’re actually really losing control,”