MIT Technology Review

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Greetings from Switzerland! I’ve just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN’s AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can be used to meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, such as eradicating poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, promoting clean energy and climate action and so on. 

The conference featured lots of robots (including one that dispenses wine), but what I liked most of all was how it managed to convene people working in AI from around the globe, featuring speakers from China, the Middle East, and Africa too, such as Pelonomi Moiloa, the CEO of Lelapa AI, a startup building AI for African languages. AI can be very US-centric and male dominated, and any effort to make the conversation more global and diverse is laudable. 

But honestly, I didn’t leave the conference feeling confident AI was going to play a meaningful role in advancing any of the UN goals. In fact, the most interesting speeches were about how AI is doing the opposite. Sage Lenier, a climate activist, talked about how we must not let AI accelerate environmental destruction. Tristan Harris, the cofounder of the Center for Humane Technology, gave a compelling talk connecting the dots between our addiction to social media, the tech sector’s financial incentives, and our failure to learn from previous tech booms. And there are still deeply ingrained gender biases in tech, Mia Shah-Dand, the founder of Women in AI Ethics, reminded us. 

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