GENEVA, Switzerland:The head of the United Nations communications agency has warned that artificial intelligence could have a huge impact on society, but said the biggest concern remained the large number of people without access to digital technology.
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) estimates that around 2.6 billion people worldwide are offline and unable to access the benefits of digital technology.
“They have never, ever connected to the internet,” Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the agency chief told media in Geneva on Thursday.
That, she said, is “what keeps me up at night … because if you’re not part of the digital world, then you’re not part of the AI world”.
“This is really one of the biggest challenges of our generation.”
The UN aims to raise $100 billion by 2026 to bridge the global digital divide.
But Bogdan Martin estimated that more than four times that amount would be needed to actually close the gap.
According to UN officials, this gap will become more acute as rapidly evolving generative artificial intelligence technologies spread.
Bogdan Martin pointed out the many ways AI could transform society, including strengthening the fight against climate change and poverty while improving education and healthcare.
But he warned that while there are “incredible opportunities”, there are also “risks and we need to be able to manage and mitigate them.”
It can also, she added, “threaten our jobs, our privacy, and I think also our very future.”
Ahead of International Women’s Day, she highlighted the “huge” gender bias in the algorithms used in the world’s most popular artificial intelligence tools.
A study published Thursday by the United Nations’ cultural agency UNESCO found that the algorithms used by OpenAI and Meta show “clear evidence of bias against women.”
Bogdan Martin, the first woman to serve as ITU secretary-general in its nearly 160-year history, said the main problem was “poor communication between women and underrepresentation of women in this field.”
The proportion of women in the offline population is “disproportionate” and there is a “lack of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields, a lack of women in artificial intelligence fields, a lack of women in quantum fields.”
