The AI summit is about safety. These safety concerns can be broadly split in two: national security, and economic risk. National security risk must then be split into military and civil risk.
On the military side, as evidenced by the standstill at the UN on the development of autonomous weapons – blocked at stages by the UK itself – there’s little hope of global consensus.
If China is at the summit, which it ought to be, the military aspect will be off the agenda. Geopolitical tensions between China and the US, along with the importance of arms manufacturing to the UK economy, will prove too tricky to navigate. If China isn’t there, some discussion will likely happen but it will probably be inconclusive.
On civil risk, we should make progress. This will likely mean a shared view of the types of risk we’re talking about. For example, bad actors using AI tools to build novel cyber weapons to enhance criminal activity. We may get as far as recognising the automatic creation of increasingly persuasive deep fake video, audio and text as being a problem.
But will the summit agree on what to do about it? No, not at this stage, and any agreement on how to deal with disinformation during an election period will probably interact with ongoing work via the G7 and therefore have to wait until December, as a courtesy to the Japanese, who currently chair the group.
The answer will be much the same on economic risk. We might agree about the potential effects of AI on our economies over the next decade or so, not least on jobs, but the reality is that we don’t really know for sure.
